NOW more than ever, it feels like the future is uncertain: the times, they are unprecedented. Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University in New York City, recently described the global outlook as a “polycrisis”, remarkable not only for the number of risks currently active, but also their volatility.
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As well as the pandemic, we have the invasion of Ukraine, inflation, pressures on food and energy markets and upheavals in global politics. Even such sober commentators as the emphasise the lack of parallels for this moment in history.
When there is little to glean from the past, it is a relief to be told how to think about the future. David Christian, whose Origin Story was a bestseller in 2018, has now turned his gaze towards the horizon.
Future Stories: A user’s guide to the future is Christian’s latest entry in the annals of Big History, the field he pioneered as a professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It combines disciplines from science and the humanities to make sense of humanity’s relationship to the cosmos, all the way back to the big bang and on into future.
This book is no less ambitious, but with more emphasis on “futurecasting”. As Christian shows, this is something humans and other species have always attempted. Living organisms are in one way defined by their fight to survive, so they “meet the future actively, with discrimination and purpose”, he says – whether it is an antelope avoiding a water hole frequented by lions, or a plant determining when to flower.
In a fascinating journey into another organism, reminiscent of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s writings on the octopus in , Christian takes us inside an E. coli cell. Though it is just a few millionths of a metre long, he says it demonstrates a sophisticated probabilistic “thinking” evolved over millions of years that enables it to survive.
From the questions asked of the oracles in ancient Greece to the famous wager by 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal on the existence of God, Future Stories is rich with insights into how we conceived of and managed the future in the past.
But the “user’s guide” of the subtitle is Christian’s real focus. He had been teaching his course on Big History, and was spurred to write Future Stories to aid his own understanding. As one student told him, not to explore what’s next left them on a cliffhanger.
The challenge of thinking about the future, he writes, is finding “the sweet spot between generality and precision”. When imagining 100 years into the future, or even 50, we often envision more radical transformation than is likely, or even possible. The tendency is to inflate both the innovations and the devastations facing us. It clouds our view of the likely or even possible realities ahead, and prevents us from acting on them.
Echoing Tooze, Christian warns we face a turning point. During the so-called Anthropocene, we have experienced more rapid change than ever with new technologies and expanding networks. Then factor in this: human populations are expected to peak at between 9 and 12 billion later this century.
These changes have accelerated to a state where “nothing seems stable”, says Christian. For him, one important barrier to thinking about the future is the assumption of its stability: it is crucial that we confront all the scenarios and dangers facing us while we may still be able to do something.
This thought may be more daunting than facing facts, even when they hint at instability, says Christian, pointing to philosopher Toby Ord’s attempt to calculate the probability of “existential catastrophes” from pandemics, asteroids and the like. Ord’s very rough estimate was a likelihood of 16 per cent, or one in six.
This seems high until you recall that most dangerous threats arise from technological and economic overreach, says Christian, which in theory we can control. “Like all gamblers, we face a delicate choice,” he writes. Future Stories not only shows how we have approached such choices through history – it helps us to understand the odds.
Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norfolk, UK
Visit the Future Stage at 91av Live for more ideas about what the future holds
