The History of the Future

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

—The Amazing Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space.

I suppose you could say I began working on a grand history of the future back in 2013, the year after I graduated college. Part of the impetus was actually the side notes about the time-travel card game Chrononauts, where the author sarcastically asked if anyone had a history of the next 100 years lying around. I ended up taking that as a bit of a challenge.

A good chuck of that timeline isn’t in the current timeline, actually. I was perhaps a little too detailed about the immediate future. (That said, I did get it right that Barack Obama would be followed by a one-term Republican and then Joe Biden!)

I was also a lot more optimistic about the future than I am now, though I still try to have some degree about this century at least. (You'll notice that there's an implicit assumption that climate change will be "solved," for instance.) I still came up with some "design principles" that I tried to keep in mind in later iterations.

(I can’t even begin to guess which iteration of this timeline I’m on, so let’s just call it 3.0, okay?)

The timeline presented here is ultimately a combination of several of my projects. It includes that "next century" project that I started in 2013, melded with a "Time Bureau" time travel story later in the year that went out to the 2400s, welded to the early days of interstellar travel in the 3000s, and on and on and ON. I even make notes about separate "interstellar/galactic empire" projects that take place after the years start to have five digits!

Currently (August 2023), I just have the main timeline, but I plan to add subsections later.