For the vast majority of humanity’s 200,000-year history, young people knew a great deal about what the future held for them, because the world they were born into was largely identical to the one in which they would die. For the past few generations — and especially today — this is no longer true. In this historical moment, we have very little idea what the future will look like — even in a few decades. While some futurists describe a technologically supercharged utopia, others argue that the planet will be largely uninhabitable by 2070. How can young people make intelligent decisions about their life paths in the midst of this radical uncertainty?

The primary goal of this course is to help young people come to their own conclusions about what their future might look like, so that they can make informed choices about how to orient towards it. In order to know where our species might be headed, however, we must first know where we are now, and also how we got here. In this course, we will therefore focus on some of the most rapidly changing features of our world (e.g. population, energy use, and various forms of technology) and we will ask:

• What are the historical and cosmological roots of the vast powers humanity now wields?
• Do our current versions of these powers represent minor upgrades or quantum leaps?
• How does this larger historical context help us face our moment’s grave challenges and staggering possibilities?