Rough Draft of a Letter to the Future [To be placed in a time capsule in Ferndale, WA in 2014 to be opened in 2064.]
Future folk,
What could be more exciting to a writer of Speculative Fiction than to be asked to time-travel? It would be slower than one would like, of course, only one day at a time, and cut off from the real world like a cat in a box. But it would connect with you, who may not have even been born when these thoughts were placed on paper.
Fifty years ago, one hundred years for you, the Cold War, the threat of atomic anhiliation permeated our culture. The fear of communism fueled wars in Korea and Vietnam, a series of assassinations had begun adding to the fear and chaos. The Civil Rights act, banning discrimination on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, became law. Those rights were still something of the future, as were trips to the moon, cable networks and flying cars. In my present, 2014, Flying cars are still in the future, but we have electric cars like the Tesla, we have been to the moon, we have phones in our hands that have more computing power than a roomful of computers a couple decades past.
At the moment, our society is not optimistic about the future. Despite being the richest human beings in history in terms of the number of hours needed to feed ourselves and keep a roof overhead, we see darkness, apocalypses. We are afraid. My novel, All Is Silence, is my attempt to send the message that human beings have the capacity for good, to find and create family and happiness and safety out of horror, pestilence and darkness. I don’t want to be right about the apocalypse and I am optimistic about the future. Perhaps I spend too much time there. As citizen-astronaut Christa McCauliffe said, “I touch the future. I teach.”
I hope that in 2064 we will have solved the problems of hunger and thirst, of equity and tolerance, of ecological degradation and consumptive waste. I am not so optimistic as to think these issues will be eradicated, but I do hope for as great an improvement in these areas as we have seen in computer technology. I want to see a human settlement on Mars, on the moon or in space stations. When I was in middle school, 35 years ago, I designed generational starships. I gave speeches about ion drive technology. And I read as much as I could about the future. Now it is here for me.
I hope to still be around when this letter is read, but at 97 I may not be. If I am not, I ask that you please, be kind to each other, the planet and all its other lifeforms. Dream big and don’t forget to live.
Sincerely,
Rob
Robert L. Slater
Teacher/Author
Dang it, Rob, you did it again – brought tears to my eyes. Yes the past 50 years have seen more changes in our life styles than I ever could have imagined and the next 50 years will no doubt bring many more changes – hopefully, most for the good of all mankind. Thank you for your kind words!
Thanks to you for being one of my biggest supporters!
Lovely. Incidentally, a friend of mine in his 90s who was a clinical oncologist and brilliant scientist, believes that “mutual aid” is the most fundamental law of the universe. I, too, hope that within 50 years, humanity will have turned away from nationalism, bigotry and fear and lived up to its heritage of mutual aid — and care for the biosphere.
Mutual Aid. Thanks, for the kind comments, Virginia. I think that is a theme that runs through most of my fiction, an opposition to the forces at work in books like Lord of the Flies.