Future stories: what's next?

A discussion of what we mean by "the future", of how living organisms prepare for uncertain futures, and of the likely futures facing our world.

Every second of our lives—whether we're looking both ways before crossing the street, celebrating the birth of a baby, or moving to a new city—we must cope with an unknowable future. How do we do this? And how do we, like most living organisms, manage this impossible challenge quite well . . . at least most of the time?

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.