Visions 2200
It may look like the International Space Station, but it isn't. The space craft is Nautilus-X, the latest American idea for human exploration of the space frontier. The spacecraft was designed for up to two years of space exploration with a six-person crew. It would contain a rotating torus to generate artificial gravity.
If it follows the pattern of other recent American visions, the space craft will never experience the light of the stars. Only time will tell if at least some of the visions on this website will come to pass in reality.
These visions are more than a look through a figurative telescope at two hundred years into the future. Most of them describe a frontier. That frontier can be a different way of thinking about life in the city. What urban place designs are most supportive of human growth and potential? It may be a frontier of knowledge, as in the case of the growing torrent of new planets discovered in orbit around neighboring stars. A similarity of these visions is the potential - whether desired, needed or feared - to be part of our human existence two centuries in the future.
A fun website provides some context to this endeavor. Check out Tales of Futures Past for a compendium of visions of what today - our ancestors' future - would look like.
Reality
Visions can move people to change the status quo. Significant change requires visions of a quality that excite the human soul. ‘Gloom and doom’, although sometimes useful in showing the need for change, will seldom move enough people to actually implement change.
People respond to visions that demonstrate an attractive future for themselves and their children. To move many to action, such possibilities must be both optimistic and exciting. The envisioned future must have perceived value and be desirable.
