The New York Times bestselling author of Origin Story, who Bill
Gates has "long been a fan of," turns his attention to the future of
humanity -- and how we think about it -- in this ambitious book.
The future is uncertain, a bit spooky, possibly dangerous, maybe
wonderful. We cope with this never-ending uncertainty by telling stories
about the future, future stories. How do we construct those stories?
Where is the future, the place where we set those stories? Can we trust
our future stories? And what sort of futures do they show us?
This book is about future stories and future thinking, about how we
prepare for the future. Think of it as a sort of User's Guide to the
Future. We all need such a guide because the future is where we will
spend the rest of our lives.
David Christian, historian and author of Origin Story, is renowned for
pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the
whole of the past. But with Future Stories, he casts his sharp
analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of
the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales,
from the individual to the cosmological.
Christian consults theologians, philosophers, scientists, statisticians,
and scholars from a huge range of places and times as he explores how we
prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution,
artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more. By linking the
study of the past much more closely to the study of the future, we can
begin to imagine what the world will look like in a hundred years and
consider solutions to the biggest challenges facing us all.
