Category: Letters to the Future

Hello to the people of the year 3011!

Hank Fox here, writing in the year 2011 – whew! A thousand years in your past.

I’m an unaltered Homo sapiens, the original version of human, with exactly zero enhancements either electronic or genetic. (Well, I do wear glasses – those are optical plastic lenses held in wire frames in front of my eyes, to correct my aging vision.)

I’m on Planet Earth, the North American continent, living within the geographical-political unit referred to as the United States, on its east coast in the smaller subdivision referred to as New York State, in the somewhat historic small city of Schenectady.

I was thinking about my life a few days ago, the things I’ve lived through, and I’m writing to tell you some small part of it. Continue reading “Letters to the Future: Hank Fox”

Something I think we forget occasionally is that those of us reading here at FTB (and here amidst this fantastic array of writers and thinkers, I’m just as much part of the audience as you) are a community.

Yeah, we sit in our separate offices or computer dens, generally in solitude, and some of us are perpetual lurkers (and nothing wrong with that) whereas others gush with  comments. But there’s something real here, something very much “us,” in that we’re gathered for the sharing of ideas and experiences. The outpourings of love for PZ Myers (stop blushing, PZ, you know it’s true) or Christopher Hitchens, the audiences that gather for the freethinker events across the country and around the world – and also, I hope, a rising political consciousness (see the National Atheist Party, for instance) – are evidence of this community.

Bearing that in mind, I’d like to try something — an appeal to our community to participate in a little project. Continue reading “Your Voice, Their Ears — A Thousand Years From Now”