There’s a time traveler from the future living a quiet life in Oceanside, California. Okay, he’s not really from the future, but he visits the future daily and brings back future news in effort to inform forward-thinking people about what’s in store for humanity in the coming decades.
Rick Schettino, calls himself the “Blogger From the Future.” He’s spreading his message about what the future holds via his web site, FutureTimes.net., an archive of future-related news links, and his blog, “Blog From the Future.”
“It’s a fast changing world,” Schettino warns, “and it’s hard to say what the future holds. Personal computer’s are generally doubling in power every 18 months. If the trend continues, in just a few years they will be four times as powerful as they are today. In 15 years they will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today. In 30 years they could literally be a billion times more powerful and be as small as a pin head. Even we futurists have little idea of what that means for humanity.”
Schettino began working on FutureTimes.net in his spare time in early 2010. The site now has 250 blog posts and over 1,000 future-related news links. He calls FutureTimes.net a “No fluff, no frills, no ads, non-profit website.” Topics include technology, the environment, and medicine – the usual futuristic topics – but he also includes news on social trends, and some pop culture to keep it light.
Schettino’s news gathering consists of a daily search through hundreds of online news sources including major news outlets and science and technology journals. FutureTimes.net also features news feeds that import scores of additional headlines from a select list of other future-related news organizations such as Discover News and MIT’s Technology Review.
“The people I think this is important to,” Schettino says, “are people responsible for any planning that extends into the coming years, like business people, parents, and also people who care about humanity and our future, people who dream of elevating human potential, and of course science and technology geeks.”
Being an early adopter of new technology, Schettino lives a highly unconventional lifestyle. “I never watch TV, I don’t commute, I don’t have a lot of posessions, I’m extremely mobile. I can work from anyplace with an Internet connection. I don’t like to be tied down to one place too long or I get antsy. I’ve lived in more than 30 places. I think that’s why I make a good futurist, I’m always thinking ahead and planning my next move.”
Cool stuff Schettino likes to “preminisce” about in his blog include artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, robotic assistants, telepathic computer interfaces, the ability to “print” household items, genetic engineering, and a cure for aging.
Predicting the future is getting harder and harder, according to Schettino. “There’s a technology tsunami coming. Most people are walking backwards into the future. They can see where we’ve been but have very little idea of where we’re going. I’m trying to spread the word that the future is going to be very, very different than the past and that we need to enter it facing forward.”
Dexter Stoneham is a fresh-from-the-oven journalist with aspirations of some day publishing Mars’ first daily newspaper. He wrote this article to get brownie points toward an intern job at http://futuretimes.net.
