The future is a place, an imagined environment that extends out of today or radically breaks from it. It is what comes after us, what we cannot know directly but anticipate. Films have sought to capture these worlds. “Snowpiercer” offers a more recent (2014) interpretation of a post-apocalyptic future, one that remains deeply divided along class lines Scholars have long discussed the patterns of change through time and how they lead to different end states. Different intellectual traditions negotiate among themselves about the idea of progress and what might define a utopia. Whether the future is highly contingent and open-ended or whether it is overdetermined and locked in from the start is another debate that takes shape around the environments of the future. These terms were chosen because they convey the outlines of recent and ongoing debates about our future environments. But not just the nature environments, but also the political and cultural environments that emerge around our day-to-day spaces. Our future is an environment that influences us in other ways than technological or the social. The way in which we envision the world we leave behind for others, what we experience beyond our lived experience, are a future that moves with us in our daily lives. The future is both a distant imaginary and a very embodied day-to-day personal environmental influence.

Environments of the future complex adaptive system dual inheritance theory end of history futurist future studies game theory historical materialism internet of things macrohistory Moore’s Law McWorld versus Jihad myth of progress scenario analysis singularity transhumanism

Complex adaptive systems A way to describe phenomena composed of many interacting parts in which deterministic and contingency interact. There is a balance of structure and memory that can persist and be inherited along with the potential for inventiveness and novelty to arise

Dual inheritance theory Inheritance is genetic as well as cultural. We inherit the environments and practices of the past through social learning, which in turn impacts our biology.

End of history Concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.

Futurist and future studies

Game theory Formal studies of strategies of individuals and groups as a function of their positions in time and space and the quality and quantity of information they possess.

Historical materialism Theory of human history in which a society's way of producing and reproducing the means of human existence fundamentally determine its organization and development.

Internet of things (IoT)

Macrohistory

Moore’s Law

Jihad vs McWorld As globalization imposes a culture of its own, populations drawn along class, historical, religious, political, and ethnic lines feel threatened and react against it

Idea of progress

Scenario analysis Anticipating the future based on comparisons of models with different underlying suppositions and controls

Technological singularity

Transhumanism