Editorial Perspective

No one talks about the future anymore.

Well that's not exactly true. Conversations online and across the media are obsessively focused on AI, climate change, and other forces poised to shape the human future.

But aside from a few futurist corners of the internet, the public conversation is limited to broad predictions of what these forces will do—AI will take 50% of human jobs by Year X, climate change will displace 2 billion people by Year Y. There's been less attempt to capture what daily human life might actually look and feel like in the future.

This is new. For centuries it was common to vividly imagine details of life 50, 100, or 500 years down the timeline. Whether the prediction was a chrome-shiny utopia or a dystopian hellscape, we combined science and fiction to build concrete visions that we could then see ourselves cutting a path toward or working feverishly to avoid.

Where are those visions now?

In 1974, it was common to imagine the world in 2024 (and to get it wildly wrong, but hey). Now that we're actually in 2024, the picture of life 50 years from now is weirdly blank, a TV screen fuzzed with snow. Aside from a broad idea of a planet pummeled by climate change or some other apocalypse, with or without zombies, it's hard to get a clear picture of the world we and our descendants might live in.

OnlySky is an attempt to shed light on the possible timelines ahead.

Launched in July 2024 as the successor to the original OnlySky Media (2022-24), the new OnlySky is all about exploring possible futures. This leaner and refocused platform is dedicated to the same mission and vision that first inspired its creation and to elevating thoughtful and creative voices in this space. By delivering short daily thinkpieces directly to your inbox, uncovering the potential paths ahead, and seeking expert opinions while applying secular habits of mind, the original founding team returns to lead this new chapter, exploring the question What's next?

What are secular habits of mind?

History has been dominated by motivated reasoning. This involves defining a preferred outcome, then "reasoning" our way to it. The worst ideologies work this way.

The scientific revolution was about creating habits of mind that control for the human tendency to find the answers we prefer instead of the truth. Think of these as secular habits of mind.

Secular, in the broadest sense, translates to "of this world." Secular habits of mind, like rationalism and critical thinking and the rejection of tribalism, get us closer to the truth than supernatural thinking can. But being "of this world" also means knowing we are evolved bags of chemicals and meat, and as much as we'd like to be rational, we aren't really wired for that.

But we try anyway to do excellent things. In this particular place, that means trying to suss out the future—or more accurately, to explore among the many possible futures, the branching tree of timelines that await the flaps of butterfly wings or the pounding of a massive hammer, each subtly nudging or forcefully pushing us onto one path or another.

Butterflies and hammers is no way to run a universe, but that's where we are. The best thing we can do is lean in to see the roads ahead.

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