Warburton Blog Post #8

The future can be a concept that is absolutely mind boggling to think about.  Almost everyone at some point in their lives thinks about what the distant future will be like and how different it will be from the present day.  In the essay, The Machine Stops, EM Forester describes a future that humans live underground in cells and rely on a machine to supply them with all needs because the surface of the earth is said to be uninhabitable.  Eventually the machine ends up crashing and destroying everyone who lives underground.  The only ones to survive are the people who live on the surface of the earth and they must make sure that this never happens again.  George Orwell’s novel, 1984 offers a projection of the future where the world is divided into three nations and a mysterious figure known as “Big Brother” watches every move people make.  If people do not believe whole heartedly in Big Brother then they are arrested by a force known as the Thought Police and are mind washed.  The Thought Police monitor everything through large screens.  These two projections of the future are similar in that they both show man losing his ability to provide for himself and needing something else to help sustain existence.  Both of these stories portray a bleak view of the future and show a world where man is not as well off as he is today.  I personally believe that these accounts of the future are very pessimistic and that the real future will have many aspects of today’s life enfused with the new and latest technology that has yet to be discovered.