Science Fiction

Perhaps I should elaborate. The future is HUGE! Our significance in it is probably negligible. Science fiction is usually about the future, or some alternative timeline, and because it's literature it's primarily for and about people.

There are an infinity of paths the course of future humanity can take, but it seems to me that several possible ones present themselves. We are quickly unlocking the secrets of our own biology and reproduction, and so far we're showing every inclination fiddle with ourselves, to improve and forcibly evolve ourselves beyond what we are. We are discovering the mathematical underpinnings of thought itself and applying those to machines, who may supersede us or merge with us or exterminate us or whatever. We are reaching for the stars with physiologies not designed for weightlessness or other gravities, and even if we don't mess with ourselves, some of us shall evolve and diverge if we make it out there.

Or, we can burn the earth and exterminate ourselves, or bomb ourselves back to the stone age and continue as we are for a little while longer.

Most likely we're either gonna die or change, and whatever the case the importance of us as we are will be merely a brick in the ziggurat of time.

But not in science fiction! In science fiction, we are silent passengers anywhere in space and time, beyond ourselves, beyond our ultimate significance--and always at the center of it all. That's one of the reasons I love it--science fiction always goes where we ourselves will never go. Optimism.