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(2015
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2015 (Index) Essay 2: Personal / professional topic |
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Victoria Webb
26
June 2015
The Evolution of the Future
As
people, I believe that we are born with a natural curiosity of the world around
us and of the future. This is evident in the literature that we read that
pertains to the future of humanity. We are always searching for the truth of
where we came from, but more than anything, our search is more often for the
truth of where we will end up. From H.G. Wells’
Time Machine¸ to modern television
shows like The Walking Dead, the
curiosity of our progression as a species plagues us. I have always found myself
attracted to books or documentaries involving the big
what-if of the future: what will the
world be without humans? Where will we go? I often ask myself how far we could
evolve until we seemingly devolve as a species, like the Eloi and Morlocks of
The Time Machine. Every piece of text
we have read at this point in the semester deals with some form of evolution or
transformation of humanity and/or the world. With such a prominent recurring
theme in these works, one can’t help but ask themselves, “what if?” I cannot
help but wonder, how far we will come, and what I will see when I meet my own
end. I believe that these questions will continue to remain, even far after I am
gone, and humanity will advance farther than I can imagine. The natural
curiosity of man can never be satisfied while the future remains a mystery.
In
the short story Somebody up There Likes
me, the future that was imagined in the early 90s is not exactly what came
about in the new millennium; however, the imagination of the futuristic
digital-evolution is not so far off that it is completely unimaginable. In fact,
the protagonist, Dante, describes his students as having digital watches into
their skin and taking recreational personalized drugs that had been mixed with
their own DNA. At the time, that may have seemed completely sci-fi, but in the
last 2 decades there have been such advancements in technology that the
personalized synthetic drugs and digital implantations of watches or phones
doesn’t seem so unrealistic. Recently I have studied education and even in the
last decade, there are so many new forms of technologies that are implemented
into the classrooms today. The old technologies I knew as a child are long
expired, and now I am beginning to understand that constant progression of
technology halts for no one. However, that is not to say that the progression
needs to end. On the contrary, I think the natural curiosity should be explored
and may be implemented into classrooms of future scholars. The classroom will
evolve with the world.
Ideally we imagine the world progressing to the height of civilization, however,
we cannot ignore the fact that humanity may just as well destroy itself; while
we hope for the progression, the latter tends to be seen as an outcome that is
most likely. Stone Lives gives a
brief glimpse into a dystopic world that has come about from a typical science
fiction high tech world, where there are the haves and the have-nots.
Stone Lives is an example of
curiosity evolving into desire, and that desire is to live and to learn. Even
after having lived in the Bungle his entire life, Stone still has curiosity of
the world around him. From the narrator describing Stone as feeling “like a
sponge” (194) to all of the information that he is soaking up, to the big reveal
when Stone learns that he was purposefully “abandoned” in the Bungle in order to
receive the “best education” from Alice (201). His entire life was purposefully
constructed so that his creator Alice could find solace at the end of her long
life, knowing the effects that her work and her company had on the world. The
desire to live to see the future isn’t one that exclusive to scientists or
sci-fi writers, it’s a desire that resides within most of us. At some point we
all wonder what will happen after we are gone, or wonder if there will be new
technological advances that allow us to live longer than our parents. Living to
be 159 like Alice Citrine, sounds like a long and exhausting time on Earth, and
I personally couldn’t imagine wanting
to live that long. Perhaps the world we live in is too “work-driven” to actually
want to live forever in; or perhaps the future technological advances will be so
great that everyone is dying to stay
alive.
At
the end of it all, we may be completely wrong, and the evolution isn’t of the
humans after all. Perhaps in the height of human civilization, we aren’t the
ones evolving. For all we know the world could take a turn into the premise of
the Planet of the Apes, and we become
like animals, while the animals become like humans. By that point it’s hard to
say what would differentiate the humans and the animals. In
Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson
plays on the idea of bears making their own technological advance by
rediscovering fire all over again.
It’s explained that the bears had lost their memory of fire until one day they
simply rediscovered fire and its uses. The idea of it may sound so absurd when
you believe that humans are the only
species allowed to evolve; however,
if you imagine that man was, at one point, savage, then it’s not hard to imagine
that animals have the capability to evolve just the same. An interesting moment
in Bears Discover Fire, is near the
end when the narrator, his nephew, and his mother are gathered around the fire
with the bears, and we see that the bears are in a communal setting, sharing the
berries and gathered together like a family. At the end of it all, who’s to say
that humans are the ones that should be evolving?
Stepping back a bit and looking at the advances that our species has made since
we first began, it’s hard to imagine life any other way. However, just by
talking to our elders we know that the world is changing more rapidly than we
could have imagined. Things that may have seemed so impossible to someone coming
to the end of their life, may be “old school” for the upcoming generation. As
someone who was born in 1990, I had a hard time finding stories like
Better be Ready ‘Bout Half Past Eight,
hard to understand as sci-fi,
simply because I myself have met people who were transgender. With all of the
technological advancements in my lifetime, it is not hard to imagine the
evolution of gender, and the greater advancements to come. Humanity will
continue to evolve and we will continue to wonder what will come of ourselves.
While most of us will not live to see the height of our species, we may continue
to imagine and hope for the best. By keeping literature of the future
significant in all aspects of education, we keep our minds open and our thirst
for knowledge unquenched.
Works
Cited
Baker, Alison. “Better be Ready ‘Bout Half Past Eight.”
Virtually Now. Ed. Jeanne Schinto.
New York: Persea Books, Inc, 1996. 22-47. Print.
Bisson, Terry. “Bears Discover Fire.”
Future Primitive. Ed. Kim Stanley Robinson. New York: Tom Doherty
Associates, Inc, 1994. 17-28. Print.
Di
Filippo, Paul. Stone Lives. N.p.
1985. Pdf.
Lombreglia, Ralph. “Somebody up There Likes Me.”
Virtually Now. Ed. Jeanne Schinto.
New York: Persea Books, Inc, 1996. 208-237. Print.
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