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the ProGressive aPocalyPse aNd other futurismic deliGhts
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At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace
are illusions. The central thesis of
Stumbling on Happiness
is that
human beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make
us happy. Our predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories
and our capacity for filling the future with the present day.
The
future
is
gnarlier
than
futurism.
NCC-1701
probably
wouldn’t send out transporter-equipped drones — instead, it
would likely find itself on missions whose ethos, mores, and ra-
tionale are largely incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its
crew that they couldn’t hope to explain them.
Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the pres-
ent is the only era that we can hope to understand, because it’s
the only era that lets us check our observations and predictions
against reality.
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