Do you ever wonder about the future?

By Rory Gilchrist

In the Admissions Office, we’ve been reading the wikipedia article on the year 2050. There are all kinds of crazy things in there—human-robot marriages, widespread extinction of fish, lots of old people. It’s a bit insane to think about what life will be like in the future. It kind of reminds me of those specials you used to see in LIFE magazine, about the ‘next’ millennium, with features like the home of the future, the car of the future, all compared to what we have today.

Sometimes I wonder what will be added to the Program by 2050. Is a book like Gödel, Escher, Bach worthy of St. John’s? What about fiction, like the Harry Potter series or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime? What books will be written in the next few decades? How long does it take for a book to “become” a classic?

It’s easy to see as a college student a lot of problems with the world today. I wonder how humanity will respond to those crises, and just how different our outlook will be.