What will your future be like?

I listened to a show yesterday on NPR that I think you’ll find enjoyable, if not interesting. I’d like you to listen to it to, but not for a while. It was about the future of the human race, and what crazy things we’ll be doing to make ourselves stronger and faster and smarter. Personally, I don’t really know what to think of it, but it seems like it could have some tremendous upside, and some terrifying downside. It all made me think of a movie called Gataca, a futuristic movie about the pitfalls of mans own genius and the repercussions of genetic engineering on society. It’s a good movie; you’ll have to watch it. I wonder what life will be like in 20 years, when you’ll be getting ready to go off to college hopefully. Will the Dodgers have won a World Series in that time? Will Hockey survive? Will the MLS become a truly dominant league in the US? So, I’m kind of a sports nut … you’ll know that by the time you’re reading this I’m guessing. But what I really wonder about is what kind of world this will be. Will we have eliminated hunger and poverty … probably not? Will we have eliminated war? Will we have moved on from the idea of a nation-state to some other sort of arrangement? What will be the history of the future? I wish I knew. I think that the reason many of us want to know the future is so that we can best prepare our children for it. You’ll probably hear, more than once in your life, “If only I’d have known that when I was younger” or some such equivalent phrase. I wouldn’t change anything that came before me in my life, because that is what has made me who I am today, and I’m OK with what that is. But I do wish I knew how things were going to be for you so that I could make extra sure that you’d always be prepared for whatever situation you came across. I guess that I’ll just have to do my best to make sure that you can make those decisions for yourself. I hope I do a good job. I love you.