We don't expect things to stay the same. We expect change. We expect changes to come faster and faster.
We think we're probably not too far from a huge shift in technology that will bring about something really big. It could be anything - rocket propulsion, energy supply, ways of communicating.
At the same time, we don’t think we have an assuredly better future.
We think the future may well be worse than today. We know that a lot of it comes from waste, negligence, and greed, because that's the way things are.
We think that untangling the mess will fail because for every person who wants to solve the problem there are those who have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. And they are more powerful than those who want to correct things.
And even if those elusive advances in technology happen, we question whether they will help us. We already wonder about that with AI.
Do we have enough time?
Asteroid 99942 Apophis will pass within 32,000 km of Earth on April 13, 2029. That's closer than geostationary satellites.
If you are in the right spot when it passes, you will be able to see it with the naked eye.
The diameter of the Earth is about 13,000 km, so 99942 Apophis will pass about at a distance that is just two-and-a-bit times the diameter of the Earth.
That's pretty close.
In 2004 when 99942 Apophis was first seen, observers thought there was a high probability it would hit Earth.
Now NASA thinks there is no risk of impact for at least a hundred years.
That's not very comforting. A hundred years is not very long when we are talking about The End.
Let's say that in seventy years the impact was judged certain, with no way to avoid it.
Can you imagine how that would knock the wind out of people's sails? How much would people care about carrying on as before - making money, aiming for success, paying the mortgage?
How would authorities impose order when every year was bringing The End nearer?
99942 Apophis is named after Apophis, the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction.
Someone has a sense of humour.
OK, Forget The Catastrophe
OK, let's assume 99942 Apophis isn't going to hit - not in one hundred years and not ever.
That's a relief.
Now think back to the days when communities were closeknit and stable for generations, how did individuals view themselves?
What was it like when whole villages grew up together and made decisions together in a community? And not decisions like whether to paint the town hall, but life and death decisions about crops and animals and defences and disease.
Everyone was part of their extended family. If anyone needed anything then they would turn to the community The State would be far-off and remote.
They would be cautious about strangers because they threatened the balance of things.
Within living memory we have seen how the individual and individual expression have ballooned like crazy.
In the great plagues of Europe, death and disease increased the price of labour and adventurers returned from foreign countries and made themselves rich, and everyone couldn’t wait to run to the city and be anonymous.
So what is it like to be an individual now? With billions of people on the planet, it is easy to say that most people are redundant, irrelevant. They are not needed to keep the species going or to develop new ideas or technologies.
At least for the time being, most people are not needed, despite falling birth rates being at or below the replacement rate worldwide.
In fact the current occupants of the planet are needed mostly so that they continue to buy things.
How satisfying is it to think that? Better not to think about it at all.
But if a person does, where do they find meaning in their lives when they are irrelevant?
In a crowded world the bottom can get knocked out of a person's will to act responsibly. They might feel that it simply doesn't matter how they react to life, the whole structure is irrelevant to them.
It gets worse. How does a person even know which of their responses are truly theirs?
We are all influenced by our environment, and what is to say that the environment is working for us and not against us?
We fear of losing our way, of being swept up in a convincing story, of being attached to a false cause?
When communities cease to exist, when man doesn't have the support of the family, the community, the village, then he is on his own.
We have to live with uncertainty, and uncertainty is unpalatable.
And with the loss of religion, any claim to a higher authority is looked at as meaningless, or oppressive, and the ultimate arbiter becomes the individual himself.
The message of the Second World War was that a man cannot absolve himself of responsibility for his lack of humanity. He cannot say in his defence that he was just following orders.
Within the law, the individual is king. the individual decides what is right and wrong.
How convenient that the individual can appeal to his own conscience above all other claims to authority.
Is it anything more than a convenient smokescreen, a mask for selfishness?
Selfishness means others have no intrinsic value. They are only valued for what they can do for us.
There is no downside in trying to ignite a spark of caring for everything into a flame. It's an experiment that needs other people who feel similarly; people that a man aspires to be like. If he finds them he might be able to find a bigger meaning.