Living like the Jetsons

The Thing from the Future

“The world is advancing into the age of technology and science is thriving. However, despite this the human race has been almost wiped by the Coronavirus. A group of evil dictators have come together to form a super army to secure world domination. Their minions have created a way to clone humans and are using it for evil. They also conveniently hold the ancient book containing the cure and vaccine formula to stop Covid-19 in its tracks. The book holds all hope and without it and with a growing evil army humanity is doomed.”

Here is an example of a game from our class where we had to create an imaginary scenario from the future using our given cards. If I’m honest I found the game a bit confusing at first, but it was a great way to get our imaginations going. I find it interesting to read about people from the past’s perceptions of the future. Something that my podcast group and I have incorporated into our CDC podcast so stay tuned for that. I doubt anyone thought that we would be able to see our favourite artists perform live from their living rooms to ours during a global pandemic or robot lawnmowers or flying camera’s and so on. You can’t help but wonder what kind of world our grandchildren will be living in. Will they have flying scooters? Will cancer become as harmless as the common cold? Will they be travelling to work in a submarine because the ice caps have completely melted upon us? The queries are endless. But that is sort of the whole point of todays class.

We were told to stand in a peculiar grid made from tape on the floor of the Crit room. We were then asked to move into the zone we felt best matched our opinions on the future and if “things” will be better or worse. Personally, I think all the potential circumstances were plausible. I stood on the middle ground between things are getting better and we can/cannot do anything because I believe everyone can make a difference no matter how small but I also believe that powerful people with money and/or government status monopolize most of the decision making and actions we as humans take to ensure the future of this planet. I feel as though as young people are just pawns in a political game and world leaders seem to only care about us and the planet when it will benefit them.

We were asked to write a statement prior to the class about something about society that annoys me. If I’m honest I could go on all day. The fact that people smoke even when they have been educated on the consequences, everything in society being based entirely around male data, the lack of decent sexual and mental health education in schools, the gender pay gap, the stigma around male emotions, sexual harassment, the world being designed for right handed people, green washing, the war on drugs and of course, peoples ignorance in relation to climate change. There will of course always be problems in society that we will not all agree with but in fairness as a country we have come quite a long way in the last couple of years. The legalization of gay marriage, the decriminalization of abortion, we have (for the moment) an openly gay Taoiseach from an immigrant family and renewable energy counts for a third of electrical generation. But, we have a long way to go.