2084- A Memory and A Future

2084- A Memory and Future

In the year 2084, I will be an 83 year old woman. Supposing I live to be 100, I will be nearly as close to my death as I currently am to my birth. The same age as my grandfather now. Who knows what will have happened? I will have taken a job, earned money, and likely be in retirement. The world will have changed around me. New technology sprung up- perhaps we'll finally have some of the wondrous technology predicted in 1984 and Back to the Future. The world will have gone through war and peace, prosperity and strife, famine and fullness.

Perhaps Elon Musk will have colonized Mars for us, and people now travel in mere minutes between the two planets. Perhaps we have made contact with alien life and now travel within interstellar ships to visit life across the galaxy.

I will live in a world vastly different from the one I live in today. The world didn't change for centuries, but now more has been accomplished in the span of one human lifetime than those centuries ever before, so this I know- the world will not be the same.
Right now, I am the new kid on the block with the super-knowledge. I can understand the TVs and computers and make them do nearly anything I want. Someday though, I could be lost in everything new, asking my grandkid to help turn on some strange contraption that will clean my home, or transport me automatically to visit my children. Perhaps I will take it in stride, like some of those before me- learning as the world changes and trying to stay much more hip than I ever will be.

The world will have been through many leaders and many movements. High schoolers will study the years of my childhood, looking back in fascination on a world as foreign to them as the future is to me, making fun of our silly looking clothes and hairstyles while themselves wearing something that will make the elders shake their heads at how much is different. The music they listen to utterly different than today's, perhaps better, perhaps much worse.

Earth will be repeating the same patterns that it always has though. Humans will grow and change and better themselves, picking up the pieces after we make mistakes, and learning how to repeat our successes. Children will grow and flourish and become the new future, adults will continue to progress, either in their boring desk jobs, or pushing forward to what they enjoy to create a progress of their own, while the elders will do what they have always done. Sit back, and watch what they have done grow and develop into what the new generations do.

In the year 2084, I will be an 83 year old woman, and who knows what I will have seen. My life will be in the final chapter, but I look forward to that day when I can see what the future has become and what the jewel of the human race has done but remember the past. It is the work of our ancestors who lead us into the world of opportunity that we all have. Even as they move on and the people you know slowly pass and leave you behind, their memories drive the human race, inspire, teach, and encourage. The past is as important as the future.

In all the years past man and woman have looked into the future to try and see what they could see. Many times they saw incorrectly, by far out proportioning what humans have the capabilities to do in a century or two, but it is this vision and this remembrance that drive society.

Never stop looking. Never Forget.