The Future Of Travel
John Ink2Quill April 2022 Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

Here are just some ramblings on things beyond a specific event horizon I don’t see much talked about in the scifi genre.

Many have predicted the future of travel with more or less accuracy. Some storytellers describe an experience, usually via an adventure. Some writers talk about the technologies. Both are good and relevant but if we talk about event horizons in the prediction of travel things get tricky. Talking about what happens to travel, what does it look like, after the event horizon of our most far thinking imaginations is a tricky thing indeed. To talk about the future of travel beyond the event horizon of our imaginations is not so obvious. That is to say, what does travel look like after we can travel faster and further? That means reaching beyond the atmosphere, Moon and our Solar System.

I don’t mean all the creature comforts, gadgets or snazzy new technological panels either. It’s not all those things that count when it comes to the effect of being able to travel further in shorter time.

What kind of societies exist beyond that achievement and how would their perspectives on life, individuality and time itself change? Society past the event horizon of travel as an obstacle would be a different one indeed. The individuals would have a completely different mentality and set of values, if they had any at all. It would not be too strange to think that societies where travel was no longer an obstacle would not, say, value other less developed ones. Like a kind of snobbism. Or maybe they would no longer see going to new places as exciting and as a result would have less respect for the environments they experienced.

We always seem to think that technology and technology alone can lift us to that state of omnipresence. But what if there were other ways to achieve omnipresence? I have trouble even imagining such ways but a good storyteller, someone who pondered this topic for a while the way the ancient Greeks pondered things, could come up with possibilities that would dazzle us. The idea is to give such a task for thought to the daydreamers, those that think outside the box, or can think outside the box because most people you give such a task to could not do it no matter how smart they think they are. To find such a person you would need to look among the weird.

John INk2Quill

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