Utopian - Dystopian

Do you ever think of the future? I don't mean 'my 5 year plan' or 'will I have grandkids' but rather 'what will the world look like'? I like to write and my prefered genre to write in is science fiction which allows one muse over future possibilities and directions. Invariably when ever I begin thinking about a story's direction or a new story idea the setting is a dystopian world. As anyone who has read my previous posts will know, I am a Christian and I do believe the Bible when it says that an Apocolypse is coming, so I guess it would be hard to have a utopian view of the future. But this is different. I don't picture the world suffering through what could be termed an apocolypse but rather a world that has emerged due to man's actions not God's. I also tend to gravitate towards dystopian fiction as well. Examples would be '1984' - 'Brave New World' - 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.

When you look at the world today, where do you see humanity heading? Is it a utopian society of mutual respect and harmony? Where war, famine, pestilence, racism and apathy are a thing of the past? Is it a world in which we want for nothing and at the same time greed has been done away with as well? A world where poverty, homelessness and hunger are nonexistent? Do you look at the world of today and see us simply as a point on the positive arc of progress? Are we building towards something greater? Or is history cyclical and therefore while we may be progressing now we have little choice but to regress in the future by repeating mistakes or reliving events from history? Or, as I do, do you look at the world of today and see us on a negative arc towards a future of problems and misery?

Wow! Chipper fellow aren't I? However I find it hard to view the events of recent history and then project a positive outcome. For instance, I watched a documentary about the advances in medical technology which will see people born around 1970 - 1975 become in essence imortal as they will be able to ride a wave of progress. Personally I can't fathom living till I'm 400, I'm a little bored now, let alone 350 years from now. They've already developed drugs to combat aging and with cloning technology on the rise they figure it is only a matter of time before we are regrowing our own livers or hearts as ours begin to fail. Okay, so great a whole lot of us are gonna be around for a real long while. The documentary on after this is one on the advances and direction in robotics. How scientists are making dramatic leaps in robotic technology which will see us have the ability to produce robots within say 50 years that will see much of human labour taken over by machines.

So great. On one hand we have a team of scientist working on ways to make I hope I'm wrong. I'd much rather see us all working towards feeding the starving, housing the homeless, healing the sick and treating one another with love and respect. I just don't see it happening. One of the main problems, as far as I'm concerned, is the notion of the nation-state. Nationalism and its resultant patriotism are a scourge upon the world which needs to be done away with. These are relatively new ideas on the world stage being only 200 years old; in essence young enough to be done away with. Of course we have to find another way of meeting the needs of the people first, but its something we should be working towards rather than simply considering them the penultimate cure for meeting human necessity.