NO ONE HAS BEEN THERE YET

Why do we hang on to the hand behind us in the dark when we're really trying to move ahead...?

For the same reason we use "horsepower" when we no longer use horses for most of our power, and "opening curtain" when most theatres no longer use curtains. Intuitively we need some touch with our past, some reference to where we've come from. Hence the study of history, and the dinner table tales from grandma and grandpa.

But we've got a problem here, Huston!

When astronauts find themselves in uncharted space, and you and I in an uncharted age, maybe the Futurists are right. Maybe humanity has finally reached our final frontiers where nothing from the past works anymore. H. G. Wells was already writing in 1895: "The past is but the beginning of the beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. A day will come when beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars."

Today, this day an astonishing century later, even our strongest leaders and wisest scholars are fumbling with old maps. Armies of tanks still confronting terrorist in the hills...international bankers still reading Adam Smith and J.M. Keynes....children still using multiplication tables and library card catalogs. Frankly, generals, bankers and teachers know as little about the future as anyone else. No one has been there yet!

Surely our Futurists do not recommend we forget our past (even while today's young often do)...surely our society can move ahead only as far as the hands behind it will allow...but just as surely those hands (our hands) must allow for the fact little kids playing with their computers hold in their hands powers and purposes not one of their elders can completely imagine.

Imagine that....!