Zukunft denken: Die nächsten 100, 1000 und 1 Milliarde Jahre

by David Christian, Hainer Kober (Translator)

What’s next? Eine Geschichte von übermorgen

Woher sollen wir wissen, was in den nächsten hundert, tausend oder sogar einer Milliarde Jahre geschieht? So paradox es klingt: aus einem Geschichtsbuch. David Christian, der Begründer der Big History, die Erkenntnisse von Geologie, Astronomie und Biologie synthetisiert, hat es geschrieben. Es ist ein Leitfaden dafür, wie wir uns die Welt des fortgeschrittenen Anthropozäns vorzustellen haben, aber auch das Ende von allem. Eine Bedienungsanleitung für die Zukunft und ein historischer Rahmen, mit dessen Hilfe wir klarer sehen – bei der Suche nach Lösungen für die Herausforderungen, vor denen wir als Spezies stehen: Klimawandel und Artensterben.

Genres: Science, History, Nonfiction, Science Nature, Business, Philosophy, Sociology

378 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2022

About the author

David Gilbert Christian is an Anglo-American historian and scholar of Russian history notable for creating and spearheading an interdisciplinary approach known as Big History. He grew up in Africa and in England, where he earned his B.A. from Oxford University, an M.A. in Russian history from the University of Western Ontario, and a Ph.D. in 19th century Russian history from Oxford University in 1974.

He began teaching the first course in 1989 which examined history from the Big Bang to the present using a multidisciplinary approach with assistance from scholars in diverse specializations from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The course frames human history in terms of cosmic, geological, and biological history. He is credited with coining the term Big History and he serves as president of the International Big History Association.

Christian's best-selling Teaching Company course entitled Big History caught the attention of philanthropist Bill Gates who is personally funding Christian's efforts to develop a program to bring the course to high school students worldwide in part via the website http://www.bighistoryproject.com

Reviews

[Francis Tapon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is broken up into 4 parts.
Only the final part is about the future:

Chap 8: Next 100 years
This chapter was disappointing.
It spent half the chapter talking about global warming - and not shedding any new light or offering a different perspective beyond conventional wisdom.

Table 8.1 was the best part of that chapter because it broke the Existential Risk into subcategories.
He took these odds from Toby Ord.
Humanity has a 1 in 6 chance of destroying itself in the next 100 years.
AI poses the greatest risk.

Chap 9: The human lineage
In this chapter, Christian imagines humanity thousands and millions of years in the future.
He spends most of the chapter imagining the year 3000.
He lacks original ideas, but what we describes will sound novel to reader who spends little time thinking about the future.
Strangely, he doesn't write about O'Neill Cylinders, even though most futurists think they will house most of humanity in 1000+ years.

Chap 10: The rest of time
Christian observes that the universe was born 1.4 Solar lifetimes ago.
It will continue for at least a trillion solar lifetimes.
So our universe is a newborn.
He talks about the cold death of the universe in trillions of trillions of years from now.
I learned nothing new, but if you haven't read about such ideas, you will enjoy the summary.

Authors often use the bulk of the book for fluff and save the meat for last.
They could have written an article or a Kindle Single, to sum up their views, but instead, they have a long preamble.

Part II is interesting because it discusses how bacteria, plants, and animals manage the future.

Read a sample on Amazon if you're on the fence.

I hope that's helpful.

[Andy Millar · Rating 3 out of 5]

TLDR:
Good book, not a great book. Feels like a solid beginner-level summary of future thinking approaches. Do not expect a ton of novel content or ideas, just an interesting way to wrap that material up together.

I acknowledge that complex concepts tend to require an explanation of assumptions and background. In that manner, this book spent a sizable amount of time introducing concepts that seemed intuitive to most anyone. That in itself is not bad, but when the simple concepts are hammered in beyond the point of utility, it is detrimental. Relatedly, the beginning portion of the book felt more like a literature review of other people’s ideas and quotes than the presentation of novel information. Once again, this is not necessarily bad, but simply underwhelming at first.

The second half of the book really picked up! As many other reviews mention, once the topics of biological sensing and simplistic future thinking sprouted, I was hooked - the shame is that this happened nearly a hundred pages in… I had a few gripes with the looseness of definition used around ‘future thinking’ at first, but the author did a good job wrapping in enough high level examples later on to convince me. Specifically, I became convinced that processes as simple as unicellular biochemical sensing could be considered future thinking. Regardless, the latter half of the book was worth the read and presented some interesting material to review. The final bit at the end, the author’s ‘predictions phase’, was entertaining but did not feel quite as powerful as the rest of the book built it up to be.

[Ramona Boldizsar · Rating 5 out of 5]

super interesantă pt mine, privirea unui istoric asupra viitorului. E foarte densă și bine documentată, cred că trebuie să ai răbdare să ajungi la final care e spectaculos cu imaginarea viitorurilor posibile. Cu toate că pe alocuri nu mi s-a părut la fel de închegată ca scop, mi-a plăcut mult s-o citesc și a fost o experiență în sine să citesc despre cum e viitorul pt E-coli, pt plante, animale, oameni și galaxii. I enjoyed.

[Jim Witkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - an enjoyable enough narrative really about the rise of life to big brained species emerging ways of thinking about improving their changes for success/survival: clarifying goals, assessing likely futures, then taking action. We could all use more of that these days.

[Jung · Rating 5 out of 5]

** You can look back at your past self the same way your future self is looking back at you. 🦠 **

Future Stories: What’s Next? (2022) explains the roots of how we make decisions about the future and illuminates the urgent responsibility on humanity’s shoulders today, with a multidisciplinary approach to time informed by biology, philosophy, and cosmology.

David Christian is a Professor Emeritus at Macquarie University, where he was formerly a Distinguished Professor of History and the director of the Big History Institute. He cofounded the Big History Project with Bill Gates, his Coursera MOOCs are popular around the world, and he is cocreator of the Macquarie University Big History School.

He has delivered keynotes at conferences around the world, including the Davos World Economic Forum, and his TED Talk has been viewed more than twelve million times. He is the author of numerous books and articles, as well as the New York Times bestseller Origin Story.

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Finding your way to the future.

Sometimes it seems like the future is fixed, part of a cycle in which the same inevitable things happen over and over again; people are born, they live their lives, and then they die. Look at it that way, and life is predictable.

At other times, the opposite seems true – it’s like we’re sloshing around in a raging river that’s dragging us all into unknown territories. At any given moment, will you win the lottery? Stub your toe? Find the love of your life?

But if the future is somehow both fixed and changeable, that makes the whole concept of time pretty slippery. How can people be expected to make decisions when they’re not sure what they’re facing – is it the inevitable or the unknown?

Welcome to David Christian’s Future Stories. We’re about to embark on a wondrous journey together, one that starts with the most basic unit of life before going all the way into the universe’s distant future. Along the way, we’ll try to understand our place on this planet – and this timeline.

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The future paradox.

Every day, every human being faces an incredible number of choices. That’s a lot of responsibility, and it can even feel overwhelming. Sound familiar? Well, here’s some good news: you don’t have as much free will as you think you do. But here’s the bad news: you’re still responsible for your choices.

If you’re scratching your head about that little paradox – or if neither of those statements sound like good news – then you’re in the right place. But before we get into it, let’s be honest: historians can’t even agree on what “the future” actually is. This problem goes back to two ancient Greek philosophers with very different ways of thinking about time.

The first, Heraclitus, believed that time flows into a future that is unpredictable, uncertain, and ever-changing – think of that raging river we were talking about a moment ago. Let’s call this A-series time. The other philosopher, Parmenides, believed that all creatures, objects, and events are fixed in time with no uncertainty and nothing new happening. We’ll call this B-series time.

Now, both of these philosophies have problems. In A-series time, it’s unclear what time is when we only ever exist in the present. When does the future become the present? How long does now last?

In B-series time, the ideas of choice, free will, and responsibility become null and void. This is called determinism. It basically means that you didn’t choose to read or listen to this book. This moment is fixed in time. Depending on where you’re standing, it either already happened, is happening, or will happen in the future.

So how do we approach future thinking? We use a little something called compatibilism. Compatibilism is the idea that free will and determinism are compatible.

According to compatibilism, certain things are fixed – think death and taxes. But it also says that within that framework, we have choice and free will. When we understand that – when we agree that we have free will and the ability to make choices – we start to ask ourselves how we make those choices. And that’s where future thinking comes in. Making a choice means taking action that will lead to an unknown circumstance. A choice comes with uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and insecurity.

Future management can help alleviate some of those feelings and lead to better choices. It starts with recognizing the geography of the future. And while there are several ways to map out the foggy landscape of the future, it’s most useful to think of it in terms of preference and possibility.

Future outcomes come in four categories: The probable, the plausible, the possible, and the preposterous. We make decisions based on our preferred future outcome combined with the likelihood of that outcome occurring. If our preferred outcome falls on the preposterous end of things, it makes sense to compromise when it comes to that outcome. On the other hand, if our preferred outcome lands in the probable category, we may want to reach for something a little more challenging.

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Future Management Skills

It turns out that the methods and mechanisms for future thinking exist all the way down to the most basic unit of life – the cell.

You may be wondering how cells can think when they don’t have brains. While it’s true that cells don’t have brains or consciousness, they do have decision-making and future-management processes. In fact, if you ever took a biology class in school, you’ve probably learned all about these.

Within each cell are a bunch of moving parts – things like DNA, genes, ribosomes, protein molecules, cytoplasm. These components are wired for survival, and they work together to achieve that goal. They speak in a simple if/then sequence and share information among themselves to make future-management decisions.

One example of how they do this is the cellular process for harvesting energy from sugar. The cell has code in the form of DNA that describes how to make a protein molecule. A ribosome decodes the DNA and follows the instructions to make the protein. The protein molecule then goes to work breaking down the sugar and turning it into energy.

But what’s interesting is how the decision to create the protein molecule is made in the first place. After all, the cell doesn’t know for certain that there will be sugar to feast on, or if there is, how much there will be.

So it follows a process that starts with preference. Remember when we talked about preferred futures? In this case, the cell knows sugar exists, and it needs energy, so it prefers a future where sugar is abundant.

The second step in the future-management process is determining the degree of probability that sugar exists. So sensor proteins make their way into the world around them to take samples. When they capture a sugar molecule, they signal the rest of the cell that sugar has been found.

The third step is taking action. Now that the cell understands there is a high probability that sugar is in the area, it goes to work creating the proteins necessary to break that sugar down into energy.

This is, of course, an overly simplified story of how the cell works, but the point is that future-management processes exist at a cellular level. They exist in single-cell organisms, and they exist within the cells of multicellular organisms like plants, pets, and people.

Plants don’t have brains, and yet their cells have goals. They check for trends and information related to probability – in a sense, by taking action, they even place bets. The famous naturalist Charles Darwin discovered this with his Venus flytrap.

The Venus flytrap won’t snap shut for just anything that lands on it. Reopening requires a great deal of energy, so the plant won’t shut unless circumstances indicate a high probability that food has arrived. For that to be the case, two of its sensors need to trigger almost simultaneously. If only one sensor is triggered, or if there’s a large amount of time between the two sensors triggering, the trap will remain open. This is future-management in action on a multicellular level.

Animals have evolved even more sophisticated future-management skills, but they continue to follow the same three steps as cells and plants. The human animal also follows these same steps.

For example, let’s say that your goal is to make a certain amount of money. Before you take any action, you’ll want to find out if your goal is plausible – or even possible – by checking for trends and information. If it is, you’ll take action. If it isn’t, you’ll change your goal.

The only difference between your choice and a Venus Flytrap’s is that you’re conscious of your decision-making process. As humans, we’ve developed nervous systems and brains that are capable of both fast and slow thinking. And even more perplexing and complicated, we’ve developed consciousness.

Future-management processes have likely existed since our earliest common ancestor’s first appearance, and they’re a major factor in how evolution occurs. And while these processes exist in all living things down to the individual cells, there’s one thing special about humans: as far as we know, we’re the first and only species able to use our free will to consciously shape the future of the planet and maybe even the universe.

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Language, Religion, and Collective Learning

Before getting into the changes in future thinking over the span of humanity’s existence, let’s talk about the three types of time.

Natural time is determined by nature. Things like sunrises, changes of season, and circadian rhythms are all part of nature’s time. Next, we have psychological time, or the way we perceive time passing. For example, when you’re at work, time may seem to move more slowly than when you’re having fun with friends. The third type of time is social time. In the modern world, the workday, holidays, and school schedules often override natural and psychological time.

How we think about the future is highly dependent on our circumstances. Ten thousand years ago, the Foundational Era ended. Prior to that, people had lived in small groups. They largely saw themselves as having a place on the planet rather than having power over it. Time and the future were very personal to them and largely related to the world they lived in. They also lived in a world inhabited by spirits and unknown forces.

But as the Foundational Era gave way to the Agrarian Era, people began forming larger groups like states and managing futures on larger scales. People who owned things like livestock or property developed systems of writing to keep track of their assets. This writing became documentation which inevitably affected the way futures were managed. In short, people began keeping data, and that data allowed them to make predictions based on past patterns.

However, even with the emergence of information collection, the people of the Agrarian Era still consulted spirits, ancestors, and divinities. Even the learned Roman Cicero saw divination as a valid form of future management.

As time passed, humanity’s knowledge grew, and divination became more and more informed by past trends and information. People seeking divination might be given answers to their questions that were just general enough to apply to a wide variety of possibilities. Or they might be given guidance to help them find their own answers.

This was the time period that German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age. It was more of a phenomenon than an era. For some reason, cultures all over the world seemed to reach new heights of philosophical and religious enlightenment at the same time.

Around 1800, technology and science were in full swing, unearthing knowledge and understanding and creating innovations and inventions at a rate that had never been seen before. Humans realized that we have the power to remake the earth into what we want. We were no longer just managing tribes or states – we were responsible for managing an entire planet.

Think of it this way: if each human being is like a cell, we’ve managed to evolve into a multicellular organism responsible for the entire body of humanity and the planet we inhabit.

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Shaping the Future

At this point, the pace of change has become much faster relative to the span of a human life. Whatever the world looked like when you were a kid, it looks much different now. We’ve become accustomed to change. Desensitized to it.

What’s more, we understand cause and effect. We’ve recorded and preserved enough information from the past to see which trends typically stay the same and which ones change. In many cases, we know why change occurs.

On top of all that, we have evolved into creative, imaginative beings. We’re able to take our questions and whatever information we have and and imagine up possible futures.

As a species, our situation has vastly improved. Our potential lifespans are more than double what they would have been two hundred years ago. We don’t have to have a bunch of babies in case most of them die – we can now have one or two healthy, happy babies and be pretty confident of their survival. We’re less likely than ever before to be living in poverty.

We’ve grown in numbers and in knowledge. We’ve created a shared set of moral values. We’ve also grown in power and responsibility. As a creative species with consciousness and purpose, future management is no longer simply an exercise in philosophy but a practical and immediate concern.

What kind of future do we want? What kinds of futures fall in the plausible and possible realms? How do we avoid the outcomes we don’t want and achieve the ones we do? In the grand scheme of the future of the universe on a scale of billions of years, these questions don’t matter.

But here we are. In terms of massive population growth, economic growth, and climate change, we’re already on a path of our own creation. We’re experiencing regressions in some of our progress toward creating an equitable and safe world for all people.

So what are we going to do about it? The choices we make in the near future will determine whether humanity experiences a Star Trek era or Star Wars era – that is, one of harmony and cooperation or one of…well, one that’s not so positive. After all, we’ve barely made it off our own planet and yet we’re in the midst of a climate crisis.

We have enough information and data from past trends to see what’s coming in the next few hundred years if we stay the course. We have enough data and information to make plausible predictions about what will happen under certain changes. That’s future management. Even as you read this, your cells are making decisions in the best interest of your body. It’s likewise the job of every human being to remember the whole body of humanity when considering the future.

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Future management processes have existed since the dawn of life. Even though certain factors are inevitable, we still have the ability to shape the future within the fixed framework of the physics of our universe. The fact that evolution favored choice tells us that choice matters. All life, right down to our very cells, uses the same process for making future-based decisions. That process consists of determining a goal, gathering data on trends, and taking action. Throughout the history of humankind, future management skills have become more and more important. Humanity is facing a crisis point where our decisions for the future today will determine how much future we have left.

[Ale · Rating 3 out of 5]

E o carte foarte complexa, care trece prin multe stiinte, de la fizica, la biologie, la teologie, la astronomie. Desi e foarte noua, si bine documentata, pe mine nu m-a prins.

[Florent Diverchy · Rating 5 out of 5]

GREAT book about the physical, mental , philosophical, scientific & religious aspects of time and future. Through many dimensions of definitions, the notion of future for plants, animals & humans is explained in a very interesting way.
The final chapters about "predictions" of short term , middle term and long term futures is also well done and reminded me a lot of Liu Cixin (the author cited him later on in that section!)
Highly Recommended.

[Nolan O'Reilly · Rating 1 out of 5]

MOST OF THE BOOK ISNT EVEN ABOUT THE FUTURE!!! BE WARNED!!! First couple chapters are very philosophical and all about like different theories of time and the future and how we relate to them. Actually quite a hard read because of all the concepts being introduced.

The majority of the book ends up being about like weird philosophies of how time works or how we experience time. But they are super uninteresting and dont actually relate to the future.

Theres an entire chapter on how cells are wired for the future and it is quite possibly one of the worst things ive ever read. You need a biology degree to have any idea whats going on, or you would need to pause and have a whiteboard out to draw all the connections that are mentioned. I cant understand why anyone would want that much detail all just to say that cells essentially have memory and prepare for the future. What a complete waste of time. Unless i took an hour to sit down and map everything out this chapter would never make sense.

A lot of the material is so dense that its impossible to read quickly at all. Found myself reading chapters but not retain anything and the material not being interesting enough for me to care to put effort in to understand. I have read dense books with lots of info, and if written well you can certainly get into it but this is not that. Feel like it should be a course not a book, which makes sense cause apparently the author teaches a future course in university.

The last 15 pages of chapter 8 were like the first actual interesting part of the book but even then was written at such a high level. The entire book should have been discussing these 4 types of possible futures and diving deep into each one of them. That wouldve made for a much more interesting book.

Chapter 9-10 were also decently interesting and what i was hoping the book would be about from the get go. But because it ws at the end i found it was not enough detail. If you just took the last 2.5 chapters of the book (which were shorter than the rest of the chapters) and then dove into much more detail on all of them, it would have been infinitely better. I cannot describe how big of a waste the first 3 quarters of the book felt like.

The last 2 ish chapters were what i would consider to be the only actual parts of the book even about the future. I don’t like to not finish a book, but this one had me really close.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is basically a research paper on future studies written by a historian—with a heavy emphasis on history and a cursory look at the future.

David Christian summarizes our grasp of the future as viewed through a wide array of scientific disciplines, especially anthropology, philosophy, sociology, physics, biology, neuroscience, and conservation science. He writes at length about the nature of time, the biological basis of memory, the history of divination, and the limits of economic growth. Only in the last fifty pages does Christian outline various future scenarios, but these are little more than a list of the speculations of others.

I was looking for a critical evaluation of future scenarios informed by the many lenses of “big history.” What I found instead was an elementary history of science, a list of predictions, and a nervous shrug of the shoulders. Not recommended.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Title is clickbait. Only last 2 chapters talk about the future, the rest is a history book

[Fathiyah Azizah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masa depan itu sesuatu yang samar tapi penting karena kita akan hidup di sana nantinya. Memprediksi masa depan seperti mencoba membuka sebuah pintu yang pasti punya banyak kemungkinan. Jikalau sejarawan meneropong masa lalu menggunakan pedoman dari catatan dan memoar masa lalu, lalu dengan pedoman apa kita melakukan perjalanan ke masa depan karena tak satu pun yang pernah ke sana? 

Nah lewat buku inilah, penulis mencoba mengkonstruksi masa depan melalui hubungan sejarah dengan masa depan. Bagaimana makhluk hidup yang menggunakan mekanisme biokimia dan saraf yang amat canggih menghadapi misteri masa depan? Bagaimana manusia dengan ciri khasnya berpikir secara kolektif mampu membentuk masa depan? Masa depan seperti apa yang bisa kita bayangkan hari ini?

Buku ini asyik sih, beragam disiplin ilmu diangkat, sampai sastra pun penulis jadikan referensi. Baca buku ini jadi pintu masuk ke lebih banyak lagi buku-buku. Fakta-fakta yang penulis sajikan, untuk menampilkan suatu kecenderungan masa depan, membuatku berpikir ulang. Kita yang berjalan melalui aliran waktu, menganggap perubahan yang kita rasa saat ini biasa saja. Nyatanya membandingkan dengan era lalu, segala teknologi saat ini bagaikan sihir. AI yang ramai dibincangkan pun mungkin akan biasa saja nantinya, juga transhumanisme, sampai migrasi luar bumi, nah ada bahas fiksi ilmiah Liu Cixin pula di sini.

Masalahnya, analogi manusia hari ini, di badai perubahan masa kini, ibaratnya mengemudi kapal ke pelabuhan di tengah badai, selagi orang-orang bertengkar di ruang kemudi. Jikalau orang-orang ini terus saja seperti itu, dari 4 skenario masa depan, yakni Pertumbuhan, Keberlanjutan, Perampingan, dan Keruntuhan, mungkin saja skenario terakhir akan terjadi.

#futurestories #kisahmasadepan #davidchristian #sahabatbincangbuku #bincangbuku

[Novia Dw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meskipun buku ini berjudul “Future Stories”, namun buku ini hanya berisi presuposisi mengenai kemungkinan masa depan, yang mana kemungkinan-kemungkinan tersebut disimpulkan dari pola-pola yang sudah pernah terjadi di masa lalu.

1/3 bagian awal buku ini membahas masa depan secara filosofis. Pada bagian ini, penulis memberi batasan bahwa manusia memandang masa depan melalui pola-pola masa lalu. Pola-pola ini jugalah yang kemudian menjadi acuan penulis untuk melihat masa depan pada bab-bab berikutnya. Penulis tak hanya membahas konsep masa depan (waktu) dari sisi sains saja, namun juga dari sisi filsafat dan teologi (bahkan beliau banyak mengutip Agustinus di sini). Pembahasan menjadi semakin intriguing saat penulis membahas bagaimana sel-sel hewan dan tumbuhan dapat memprediksi dan mengelola masa depan di pertengahan buku. Premis utama buku ini adalah bahwa penulis mencari kemungkinan masa depan berdasarkan perbandingan pola-pola yang pernah terjadi pada masyarakat berburu, masyarakat agrikultur, dan masyarakat modern.

Layaknya Malthus yang telah salah memprediksi kelangkaan pangan di masa depan karena tidak memperhitungkan perkembangan teknologi di masa depan, di buku ini penulis juga memandang masa depan melalui sudut pandang masa kini yang cukup terbatas. Dan seperti biasa, penulis juga bukan penulis pertama yang asal mengutip ayat Alkitab dan menginterpretasikannya secara salah (beliau menginterpretasikan janji Tuhan ke Nuh sebagai perintah agar manusia mengeksploitasi bumi dengan cara mewajibkan aktivitas agrikultur). Di sisi lain, struktur penulisan buku ini cukup runut. Overall, saran saya untuk siapapun yang mau membaca buku ini I advise you to take the author’s takes with a grain of salt.

📝 3.75 // 5

[Pi]

Nie spodziewałam się, że książka będzie tak dobra. Może nie jest idealna, ale jest rewelacyjny tematem do rozmów i daje do myślenia. To taka pozycja do przemyśleń, bo David Christian w swoich HISTORIACH PRZYSZŁOŚCI połączył rozważania filozoficzne z tymi naukowymi, mamy humanizm i biologię, kosmos i komórki, które uczą się na błędach.
HISTORIE PRZYSZŁOŚCI. CO NAS CZEKA?, to dobra pozycja do podczytywania, do wybierania tematów, do rozważania i do zastanawiania się nad poznanymi treściami. Może nie jest to lektura, którą czyta się szybko (ja wciąż podczytuję), ale mi osobiście daje sporo intelektualnej radości. Przyszłość wszystkich nas w końcu czeka... więc warto trochę o niej pomyśleć.
Zdanie, które mi utkwiło w pamięci - choć tych zdań akurat tutaj jest całkiem sporo... wraz z teoriami i wykresami wszystko absolutnie fascynujące i dobre do rozkminy - brzmi: Przeszłość przeminęła. Przyszłości jeszcze nie ma. Słuchajcie ptaków!" PIĘKNE i absolutnie, całkowicie trafne.
Muszę przyznać, że autor dał popis łączenia rozmaitych dziedzin ludzkiego poznania, gałęzi nauki, filozofii... religii. Wszystko to, cała ta mieszanka, daje nam ciekawy i niebanalny obraz człowieka w czasie i przestrzeni i tego, że jedyne, czego możemy być pewni, to śmierci. Książka podoba się także niejakiemu Bill'owi Gates'owi i choć facet ma trochę więcej pieniędzy niż przeciętny Ziemianin.... to też umrze.
Mogę spokojnie polecić HISTORIE PRZYSZŁOŚCI. Ciekawe rozważania, naukowe wywody, zmieszane z tymi filozoficznymi. Świetne połączenie rozmaitych teorii o czasie. Jasne przedstawienie poruszanych tematów z dbałością o... nazwę to "czynnik ludzki". Podoba mi się.

przyszłości nie ma
Wydawnictwo Zysk i S-ka
egzemplarz recenzencki

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 3/4 of the book deal with the history of how we think about the future, ranging from the philosophy of time, to how various biological systems function. As a result, there is scant space to tell stories about the actual future, with a chapter each devoted to the upcoming century, millennia, and beyond. This would have been ok had the foundations set in the bulk of the book been utilised to create a framework in which to discuss possible outcomes, but instead we get traditional speculation about climate change, nuclear holocaust, superintelligent AI, transhumanism, Dyson spheres, and the heat death of the universe. That's way too much material to fit into 3 measly chapters, and at best provides a cursory overview, with little insight into informing the most likely scenarios.

Although the author has done his best to make the material accessible to a general audience, he cannot shake the academic urge to clutter the narrative with all sorts of extraneous facts, references, and quotes.
The formal British accent and delivery of the audiobook narrator doesn't help any, he makes even a silly Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference sound like a BBC broadcast of a lecture to the Royal Institute delivered at Oxford.

[Yanal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blinks:
1. The future paradox: Every day, every human being faces an incredible number of choices. That's a lot of responsibility, and it can feel overwhelming. Well, here is the good news: you don't have as much free will as you think you do. But here's the bad news: you're still responsible for your choices. We essentially have two frames of thought: Determinism(No free will) or Free Will
2. Future Management Skills - It turns out that the methods and mechanisms for future thinking exist all the way down to the most basic unit of life -the cell.
3. Language, Religion, and Collective Learning - If each human being is like a cell, we've managed to evolve into a multicellular organism responsible for the entire body of humanity and the planet we inhabit.
4. Shaping the Future: We have enough information and data from past trends to see what's coming in the next few hundred years if we stay the course.

[Nestor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, at the quantum level, uncertainty leads and limits our knowledge, but those particle emerges as bodies, something that is governed by Newton's certainty laws; otherwise, if they were so unpredictable, they could not form bodies.
How can we say the universe is mathematical if it's not predictable? In any case, it will be probabilistic.

Epic of Gilgamesh ---> Another individual hero, that's why collective action is impossible, it's human individual actions.

Malthus was right, not wrong, since the human population has increased predating the rest of the planet's life. Humankind has destroyed the environment to increase its share. He was not blighted as many want us to believe, but he foresight what is happening now, the destruction of the environment.

I like that he has a critical view of capitalism and the destruction of the environment with its continuous pursuit of profits over anything.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn't what I expected it to be. A more accurate title would be: "Divining the Future: How Nature And Humanity Manages And Prepares For The Future And How This Guides How We Imagine it".

75% of the book actually looks at the past. This is not surprising since the author is a historian.

Starting with the philosophy of the future, the bulk of the book then looks at how nature manages different futures and how we humans have tried to prepare for the most likely futures.

Only the last section is about imagining the future and it takes a very big picture approach looking at our species, the planet and the universe at timescales of 100 years, thousands of years and millions of years.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly interesting book.
There's a lot to digest. Some chapters, I don't know why they are there, like the ones about devine purpose and religion.
Some thoughts I found very interesting e.g. the fact that other cultures and possible earlier people thought of the future as constant and not changing much. Of course there is a necessity to be able to prepare for changes in the future even if it's just preparing for winter by storing food. But the world as such was thought to not change much.
We can't believe this nowadays with climat change going on...
Also, sometimes I wonder how much influence the knowledge of extinction (especially when all kids are literally breathing in the dinosaurs) influences our future thinking.

[Tyler Standish · Rating 4 out of 5]

An expansive exploration of how we perceive time and view our future as humans. There are many things to learn from this book, but the main thesis is that to prepare for the future, we study regular trends in the past. The larger the prediction, the larger and more detailed study of the past. To demonstrate this necessity, David Christian ambitiously takes us to the beginning of time and offers some ways to look at three different future timeframes. I highly recommend this book!

[Robert Sparrenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just grabbed this off of the shelf at the library and dove in. It was interesting. I enjoyed the section where he talked about how to look at the future on a graph that shows possibilities versus being really high in space and looking down at a raft drifting down the river and seeing the future that way.
This book isn’t for everybody but it got me thinking so 4 stars.

[Patrick Pilz · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Christian's books are always illuminating, here on how living things shape the future and what it may behold. Of course he will be wrong, like all futurists, but still an interesting read for all of us.

[Synthia Salomon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Future Stories: What’s Next? (2022) explains the roots of how we make decisions about the future and illuminates the urgent responsibility on humanity’s shoulders today, with a multidisciplinary approach to time informed by biology, philosophy, and cosmology.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

another way of saying shallow speculation

to quote the awesome soul who reviewed one of Christian's other books, the comment applies here s well

..............


A shallow, boring and inconsistent history
Arievanderbruggen

[cactus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of the book is misleading, this book was more about the history of time (or how people thought about it, at least). nothing that insightful or novel ideas about the future were written, but the big history perspective was great

[Mark Hartman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is interesting but kind of dry reading to me. I just couldn’t get into it. I will try again later but right now I will move on.

[Asna Ally Mbaji]

It good

[Anna Cristina Severeid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are free will and determinism are compatible? Making assertive decisions for the future means condistently determining a goal, gathering data on trends, and taking action. 

[Nida · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was completely blown away when I got to Chapter 9! Seriously, it was like my mind was racing. This chapter dives into transhumanism, talking about how we could possibly evolve beyond our current physical and mental limits using technology and genetic changes. Christian ties this into the bigger picture of human development, showing how these advancements might change what it really means to be human.

But honestly, I love the whole book because it introduces so many fresh ideas. Christian looks back at past events—like how life has evolved and how technology and society have changed—to help us tackle the challenges and opportunities coming our way. He also covers important topics like climate change, AI, and global teamwork, urging us to think about how our choices now will shape the future of humanity and our planet.