It's interesting to look at the changes in the last few decades of our perception of the future. If you look at older (i.e. 50s–70s era) science fiction, artists' impressions of what "The World of Tomorrow" would look like, you see a Utopian ideal of humanity spreading across the stars. We see people zipping around in their flying cars from their houses on the moon, their houses maintained by robot butlers, maybe taking a vacation to Mars for some sunbathing.

Today's dreams, on the other hand, seem much more bleak. Our future dreams seem to be primarily of narcissistic self-fulfilment—technology exists mainly to make us more beautiful, intelligent, et cetera—it seems as though we've forgotten our lofty goals of living amongst the stars.

When this point of view was first presented to me (by Adbusters, if I recall correctly) I accepted their premise that today's society has become one of petty and destructive self-indulgence and entitlement. Back in the "good old days", people had lofty ideas, to see the stars! Explore new worlds! Usher in an era of futuristic nirvana! This is, however, missing a fairly important point: When you look at those artists' renderings of the space cities of the future, do you see any blacks or Asians amongst the crowd happily wandering about the space-diners? Do you see any space-women going off to work, or driving their own flying cars? Why are all the spaceteens wearing bell-bottoms anyway?

My point is, when they dreamed of the future, they dreamed of a world were they stayed the same and the world changed for them. They may have thought they were being progressive, but they were merely transplanting their biases.

Today, when we dream of things to come, we think of furthering ourselves, but this is not hubris. The simple fact is that before we can conquer our galaxy, our solar system, or even our own planet, we must first conquer ourselves: The key to the future is develop the human mind before worrying about anything else.

Today, we know that visiting other planets within our solar system will be difficult, and leaving our solar system is likely impossible. The frontiers that we challenge will be internal.

If we cannot master ourselves, how can we expect to master anything beyond ourselves?