The Future of Life

Many books, speakers and thinkers have considered the far future. For the most part, however, those works have focused either on the end of nature or on the rise of technology. Both visions are wrong, or at least incomplete. Regardless of our technological innovations the future will remain biological. As long as we exist, we will be among the living. Our human needs are biological. We depend on many thousands of individual species. Because humans will remain biological and life’s big story will not soon end, the rules of life will be as relevant a hundred, a thousand or a million years from now as they are today. This class considers what such rules can tell us about the future and the ways in which an understanding of these rules, whether they be the rule of our own ignorance, the rules of diversity, the rule of escape or rule of evolution, tell us about what lies ahead. Ultimately, we can engender a better future in light of these rules. But we can only do so if we understand them in the first place.

This exhibit features interviews by students Bradley Allf, Lucie Ciccone, Cody Hinson, Felicia Krekeler, Sarah Krementz, and Elle Whitlock as they explore the future of bees, of wilderness, of microbes living in the deep, of biotechnology and much more.

"The future interests us all. We share this interest. But just what we want to know about the future, that is individual. In these interviews, students focused on the future of life and were able to pose their own questions to experts in disciplines that interested them. These interviews help us to see what might be, through the questions of a group of very clever young people I was lucky to get to work with for a semester." —Rob Dunn