The Future of Love

“If we are to have a future, we need to work together towards a common goal of survival. It needs to be one where humans, animals and machines have finally found a way to understand each other and live harmoniously. If we don't love our future, and see a future of love, there will be no future.”
— Mickie Kent

If you are an admirer of the Disney Pixar animated movies, you may have heard of the Pixar Theory, where every character you've seen lives in the same universe on the same or different time-lines. The basic concept of this theory is that love is the crux of the entire Pixar universe. The love of different people of different ages and even different species finding ways to live on Earth without destroying it because of a lust for energy.

If you look at our real world, most of the great wars that have been fought have been over resources and energy, and because we haven't been able to live well together. This causes regression. only when we have worked together have we been able to progress in our evolution to a point where out intelligence as been able to develop highly enough for us to question our own origins. It seems we are being outnumbered by violence and ignorance, and as our "parents" these are reproducing more and thus donating to the gene pool - it looks like it is no longer the fittest that will survive, but the fittest to ultimately destroy that survival.

I am not saying that Pixar or its movies are a blueprint for how we must proceed in the future. That is just fantasy. But the precept that love is the key to our survival is an important one. With the current crisis facing us in modern times, things are not working. From the violence in Egypt, to Russia's political warfare against gay rights, battles are all the rage. So is deceit.

Russia is really embarrassing itself with it recent spate of epic fails. The mayor of Russia's fourth-largest city, Yekaterinburg, has been using unsolicited images of famous women to sing the praises of its "rape-free environment". Of course, this was ridiculed by everyone, and it even provoked a parody campaign featuring Breaking Bad meth-chef supremo Walter White, championing the city's drug-free nature.

But Russia is not alone in its downfall. In Korea, we can't even go to a promotional launch without weapons these days, and have it descend into violent mass hysteria. There seems to be a push for domination, not only over our resources, land and all things living, but over who we choose to love. The news of British teenage girls flown abroad for forced marriages has shocked many, and it is a terrible sign of the times. Now more than ever, we need a new solution. And we need to stop lying to ourselves.

So, how can we change the world we live in? What does the future hold for us in a decade or fifty decades from now? It is obvious that we need some great ideas into how to change the world from the current state it finds itself in today.

Working together is the key, and working together fairly and with equal respect (with love in short) to create the new technologies of the future that will herald in a great new dawn for not only our species, but all live on Earth. We are always looking at the future to some extent, hoping for something better than what we have now, but the groundwork of all futures are laid in the present, and done so with an eye on the past.

Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next

A 1972 book which predicts what life would be like in 2010 was reprinted after attracting a cult following, but how hard is it to tell the future?

Geoffrey Hoyle is often asked why he predicted everybody would be wearing jumpsuits by 2010. He envisioned a world where everybody worked a three-day week and had their electric cars delivered in tubes of liquid. These colourful ideas from his 1972 children's book, "2010: Living in the Future", helped prompt a Facebook campaign to track him down. His work was reprinted with the year in the title amended to 2011.

“I've been criticised because I said people [would] wear jumpsuits,” explains Hoyle, the son of noted astronomer and science fiction author Fred Hoyle. “We don't wear jumpsuits but to a certain extent the idea of the jumpsuit is the restriction of liberties.”

Hoyle's book is a product of its time. The move towards a planned society with an emphasis on communal living colour it.

“Most of it is based on the evolution of a political system,” Hoyle notes. The author also predicted widespread use of “vision phones” and doing your grocery shopping online. He is one of a long line of science fiction authors to have tried their hand at futurology, the discipline of mapping out the future.

“If you go back over the years in terms of science fiction and fantasy you find many very brilliant simulations of futures that have occurred,” says Richard Rhodes, author of "Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World".

Perhaps one of the most celebrated pieces of futurology by a science fiction author was Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of a network of satellites in geostationary orbits [effectively remaining at the same spot in relation to a fixed point back on earth]. The idea of satellites in geostationary orbit had been floated before but Clarke was the first to see the possibilities for their use as relays for broadcasting and communications.

And HG Wells was years ahead of his time, predicting nuclear weapons in 1914, and later inspiring physicist Leo Szilard. In more recent times, author David Brin, in the 1989 novel "Earth" and in his other works, predicted citizen reporters, personalised web interfaces, and the decline of privacy.

“The top method is simply to stay keenly attuned to trends in the laboratories and research centres around the world, taking note of even things that seem impractical or useless,” says Brin.

“You then ask yourself: ‘What if they found a way to do that thing ten thousand times as quickly/powerfully/well? What if someone weaponised it? Monopolised it? Or commercialised it, enabling millions of people to do this new thing, routinely? What would society look like, if everybody took this new thing for granted?’”

Conscious efforts at futurology go back a long way. In 1931, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, the New York Times went to several prominent men for their predictions of what life would be like in 2011. There were “hits”. William Mayo predicted a 70-plus-year lifespan. Other predictions about an ageing population and less importance for national boundaries were promising. But there were bad misses - certainly for Michael Pupin, the physicist - who predicted the equitable distribution of wealth. A similar exercise had been undertaken in 1893 - looking forward to 1993 - for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Florida as a major tourist destination and fast trains are among the hits, but there are many misses. Politician John J Ingalls was one of the most prescient when he wrote about travelling from New York to London in less than a day.

Predictions, failed or successful, tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about the future. Go back to the early years of the Cold War and predictions of catastrophic nuclear war were widespread.

“It is the dog that didn't bark,” says Rhodes, also author of "The Twilight of the Bomb". “In the nuclear community in the years after World War II, they were pretty clear if we didn't eliminate nuclear weapons, if they didn't get it under control, there would inevitably be a nuclear war. They didn't see the deep existential fear those weapons induced in leaders of the various countries.”

And it's easy to get things wrong or to miss a potential development, because an insurmountable obstacle seems to stand in the way. One common wrong prediction, made by utopian socialists in the 19th Century, and cropping up in 1893 and 1931 and many times since, is the idea that mechanisation just has to go a bit further to earn us all a life of leisure.

Hoyle's three day week for 2010 has failed to materialise. “People are going to have to work very hard. It's gone the other way. People are working seven days a week. I'm very pessimistic now,” he says. But Hoyle got it right when predicting the role of the vision phone. And the vision desk sounds rather familiar too. “The glass on top of the screen is made in a special way so that when you write on it the camera photographs what you write.”

If you predicted today that within a few years time key electronic devices like phones, GPS and media players would be embedded in the human body, you would hardly be saying anything daring. “It's fairly straightforward to extrapolate from existing technology - that tends to be what people do,” says Rhodes. “But the really important changes are almost inevitably complete surprises.”

The proliferation of the computer and the microchip comes into this category, according to Tim Mack, president of the World Future Society. “Computers were all looked at as big data crunchers,” says Mack. “People missed that – the embedding of chips in just about everything.” Futurology is big business now. The defence industry picked it up a long time ago, but now it's used in everything from consumer technology to food firms. And it will still prove delightful to read 2010′s predictions in a century's time.

We humans decided a long time ago that living together in cities was the best way to organise ourselves. Over half of us worldwide now live this way. We've become an urban species, and urbanisation means living together in ever decreasing smaller circles. Surely this again means that working together will become more important than ever? So how will we run our super cities as they get bigger and bigger?

As our cities grow faster than ever, there are challenges we are all going to face. There are projects to give cities a "mission control" - in effect a "brain" - building a comprehensive system based on live information about emergency resources with the latest tracking technologies to link up with crews and authorities to solve crises in the city as fast as possible. But such systems, which are already employed in mega cities like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, are not only about solving issues that may rise today. It's about collecting data and analysing it, and so learning how the city works, and how it be changed for maximum, effective output - without wasting valuable energy and human resources. Other patterns, such as time of accidents or crime may also help with prevention.

Such systems are about turning cities into organisms in effect, and mega cities with "brains" is a great example of how cities will be working together in the future. More than anything, it is the system's potential to be able to learn, adapt and predict to such a sophisticated degree that will mean either survival or destruction for our increasingly complex living spaces, because it will be more responsive to change.

It is no secret that children are probably the most responsive, or resilient to change. And as Whitney Houston once sang - children are our future. But some children take a step further into the future than others. Take Taylor Wilson, for example, who at the age of 14 built a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage, or Jack Andraka, who invented a diagnostic tool to detect pancreatic cancer when he as 15. A very great thinker, who was once one of those children and built a particle accelerator in his garage when he was 17 years old, and now is Professor of Physics and at the City University of New York - and an expert in all things futuristic - is Michio Kaku.

Kaku was a child from a very poor background, but he had big dreams, and they won him a scholarship to Harvard University, and what set him in the direction of working in theoretical physics and working on string theory. In essence he is trying to find a theory for everything, a unified link that connects one and all with the answers to everything.

Kaku is also an expert on the future, and he tells that us that within a decade computer chips will cost about a penny, and that the internet will be everywhere and nowhere, including your contact lens. Technology and machines will be submersed and meshed into our way of living, and in the future we will need to learn how to work together with our gadgets in a more harmonious way. In the future, it's envisaged that even our wallpaper could be intelligent, turning into a holographic doctor during medical emergencies, or just changing colour to suit your mood for that day.

Another theory futurists put forward is not just about increasingly technologies, or lack of city space, but that for the longer term survival of the human species it needs to become a two planet species. It is thought we need to sort out the kinks in our interplanetary travel, and strengthen our space programmes if we don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Recently, skygazers have seen the high point of the annual Perseid meteor shower - which occurs when the Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. In about a century, this comet should get close enough to Earth so it can be seen Haley's Comet-style. In a a few thousand years - the year 4000 or something - it might hit the Earth. It's twice as big as the one believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Futurists say it is very probable that, in two thousand years from now in the sky-blackening fallout from the impact of a 26km lump of space krud, humanity will perish.

Dinosaurs did not have a space age programme.

The Earth is in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery, and the odds are we are going to get wiped out by an asteroid or comet at some stage. Look at Chelyabinsk in central Russia and the meteorite that hit there in February. That city was hit with an asteroid that blew up overhead. If that had stayed intact for a few more seconds, it would have hit the earth with the force of about 20 Hiroshima bombs. And it just missed the Earth by seconds, that;s how close we came to a disaster just a few months ago. It further demonstrates how we don't really monitor all the potentially dangerous rocks out there.

Perseid shower in 2014 to accompany supermoon.

The fact is our ultimate survival is not just in our own hands, but it will only be by working together that we can be assured of any certainty that when a challenge does arise, however large, we are ready for it. Many futurists are unified in believing that we do have a brighter future ahead of us, because science is the engine of prosperity. All the wealth we see around us is due to science, and science will continue to generate jobs, new industries, make life easier, extend the human life span - and all this will only be done by great minds working together - not necessarily thinking alike, but thinking with love, with passion, with that spark that drives us to create rather than destroy. It will come at a price. The future will also come with less privacy, but we will have more abundance of wealth and a more convenient life.

One thing that is certain, is that our brain will mark us out as being different from other animals, and knowing more about how they work will be crucial. I wrote a very popular mini-series called "Love Your Brain" which delves into the workings of the brain, our evolution and what it means to be human. I enjoyed a huge response my readership via email, and it created some interesting discussions. When it comes it the brain, it's fair to say we almost have no definitive idea of how it works. We've been studying our brains for hundreds of years, but we still don't know what a thought is, or really what memories are - never mind autism, or schizophrenia.

That's because we don't understand enough about the anatomy of our brains, how our brain cells communicate and connect with each other. But in the future that could all change. In an incredible leap forward in our understanding of that most complex of structures, one of the world's most talented neuroscientists, Karl Deisseroth, has unveiled an incredible new technology to reveal the wiring of the brain.

Deisseroth's revolutionary technique reveals every brain cell, every connection, in detail we never thought possible. It is hoped this will transform our understanding of detailed brain structure, and tin doing so, help us to finally understand how our brain really works. From the outer cosmos, to the inner universe of the mind, high resolution images of living neurons in the human brain could guide us to unlock the secrets we have within ourselves. It will be a unique window into how a brain adapts after injury, or enlarges after learning something new - a glimpse into the human brain, and into the individual itself functioning in real-time.

It may help us answer some of the moist profound questions of all about personality, mental health and even consciousness. We've never trapped consciousness in a bottle. There are many ideas what it looks like, and what its scale is - is it in one place, or everywhere? Is it fast, or slow, or both? We might see an answer to these questions in a decade or so, if we stop our fighting and petty squabbles over land, resources and religion and look to working together under the opportunities provided by science.

With the pieces of the consciousness puzzle starting to appear with amazing new technologies, if we continue to pursue science in a passionate spirit of togetherness and camaraderie, then our future looks great. We can start to see our future with unprecedented clarity, which give us not only hope, but armour against an uncertain future.

Some say nature is the true technology, and that any human technology is built only to pervert nature, but today we know that we can build tools that are in harmony with nature, which are ecologically as well as ergonomically sound. Taking this one step further, especially towards understanding our brain, is to actually utilise the hormones and chemicals in the brain to create harmony on our lives and the world at large. Harmonising our gadgets with nature is one thing, but we also need to harmonise ourselves to our environment.

For example, work on serotonin - one of many chemicals in the brain that helps transmit certain signals - has been done to see how controlling serotonin levels and functions influences people's decision making. The research seems to suggest we are more spiteful when our serotonin levels are low, and although it's a complicated system and scientist still don't have a string grasp of how it works, it is very suggestive that if we can harmonise the chemicals in our brain, it may help to us to react less violently, or at least more calmly, in everyday situations. If you are chronically stressed, this will, over time, tend to deplete serotonin levels, which could shift you towards a more spiteful or retaliatory strategy. This has been done in primates, and it is not one hundred percent certain it corresponds in humans, but given our close-knit genetic kinship, it is almost likely.

Could understanding our brains be the true roadmap to peace? Could control of our mind also lead to other greater powers? When people talk of the future, we are also promised a form of immortality, or life after death. Cryonics, from the 1960s, is a well-known technique of freezing bodies for a future period when medicine has advanced to a stage where it can fulfil that promise, but will such resurrections every come to fruition? The problem is that it's no trivial matter to freeze and de-freeze someone after their death. As we are made of over 70%-80% water - ice does something weird to the cells that we're all made of, which is who we are, after all, cells that interconnect.

Water expands as it becomes ice, and in effect becomes too large for the cell. As the ice crystals form, they're basically disrupting all the machinery inside the cells. They can poke through the membrane, and splinter them. There is a potential solution to this, where the freezing process is done so quickly that there isn't time for this to take place. One of the ways scientists believe this might be achieved is be using very, very cold liquid, such as liquid nitrogen, but science is still unsolved on the matter.

Is science too focused on immortality?

There also needs to be discussion about the fact that the human population continues to grow and we are getting older and older, especially in developed countries, and at some point as a society we have to have a discussion about how old we actually want to get. Is there a point when we need to have science not over-emphasise on things like cryonics and focus on other things - such as fighting issues that cause the deaths of the young, for example, rather than worrying about extending our general lifespan. The ideal is have a healthy young person live to a healthy old age and not suffer too much through illness. We need a much more realistic discussion about what is a dignified end, while science tries to resolve how that end can be postponed for as long as possible.

Of course, futurists know that a lot of what they theorise depends on unsolved science, and that it will be solved some time in the future, but without the passion and drive pulling people together to work towards a common goal for the betterment of all life on Earth, then this will remain a pipe-dream. Currently, we carry around with us not only our dreams, but very sophisticated materials in our pockets and bags that makes up our own personal technology. These use up planetary resources, too, and the problem of our resources will remain an issue in the future. For example, we use rare earth metals to make many of our technologies, including smartphones. There are nine known rare earth metals in the world, and 90% of these come from China, but we do not have an endless supply of these materials.

Will we continue to war over our resources? Or will we find more peaceful solutions by working together? Well, some believe help could be at hand. As unlikely as it may seem, there are people planning to mine the surface of the Moon. Asteroids are some of the richest sources of metals in the solar system, and that means that the Moon, which has been bombarded by asteroids, will have billions of years' worth of asteroidal metals lying in its soil for the taking.

Most of the heavy metals we mine here on Earth were also dumped here by asteroid impacts. At a mining facility in North Ontario, they're pioneering sampling equipment for mining the Moon. It is seen as the next wild frontier, but is mining the Moon really feasible? We've always used brute force to mine, with enormous drills and machines and bombs, but this won't necessarily work on the Moon. Asteroids hitting the Moon will have had their minerals vaporised on impact, scattering far and wide through the lunar soil. It could just be a case of scooping up the minerals on its surface, but even that is easier said than done. Machines for digging on the Moon have to deal with dust that behaves like none you'll ever see on Earth.

Scooping up Moon dust poses another problem you don't get on Earth. Those areas in permanent shadow could be frozen solid, and much colder. Whether scooping, digging or drilling, it's obvious humanity will have to get equipped before it tackles Moon dust as a resource. But that presents another problem, because flying heavy machinery up to the Moon is the last thing your want to do, engineers say. This is because launching and landing, soft landing, something on the Moon is very expensive. To imagine the expense they work with, it's estimated to land a one litre bottle on the Moon would take about a quarter of a million US dollars.

Will Moon mining become a viable industry one day?

Thus, even though the technology to harvest lunar soil is real, and mining its surface deposits are thought to be possible, it would would have to compete with terrestrial mining back at home. Competing against big business is always going to be a block, unless it become the cheaper option. The question in today's world is not whether the imaginable is possible, but whether it would be economically viable? New developments are transforming the way governments and big businesses look at Moon mining all the time, although - whether this audacious plan could work is uncertain as of 2013 - one thing is clear, it will only be achieved through cooperation.

It may even make more sense to keep lunar resources on the Moon itself, and use it as base for future space exploration. In terms of future resources, the real value of Moon mining is so much more than just a source of raw materials. A self-sufficient mining base would give us our first home away from home in the solar system. We could mine there to create the equipment we need in situ for deep space travel. It goes back to the futurists' theories about the human species needing to become one that has the tools to colonise and habitat other planets in our universe in order to secure its survival. The potential rewards from that are astronomical.

Scans of the Moon also show there is helium-3 on the Moon, and some people theorise this can be used as fuel for fusion reactors of the future, but the real question of resources comes into question when we speak about helium on Earth. There is only a finite supply. If we run our of helium on Earth, it will cause major problems. It's the best refrigerant we have, for example, all the diagnostic equipment we have in hospitals is cooled using helium.

Helium is the only atom species that escapes into space and leaves the Earth's orbit. The worst time-frame estimate we have in terms of running out of helium is a likeliness of 50 years, and a clear likelihood in the next century - so we have many problems we need to focus on, rather than killing each other for resources that can be utilised just as well by sharing. Evolution demands it; it used to be thought that being selfish would help a species survive, but the science now says that not only is it important to be generous, our species' survival depends on it.

Moreover, collaboration leads to great ideas. The search for alternative energy sources is relentless, and some projects are as bizarre as they are imaginative. Fuel cells that run on urine is just one such example, broken down by a cocktail of bacteria to generate electricity. There is no shortage of urine, even in remote places, and fuel cells like this could be used to power everything, from lights to mobile phones.

The collaboration of science and technology is also bringing our widening our understanding of nature. A spider's web is one of nature's most deadliest traps, and now scientists have discovered why some are so effective. As insects fly, the movement of their wings builds up positive charge, and that draws the web towards it. Scientific video documentation shows that the moment the two touch, it's all for the fly. And it will be all over for us too, if we don't learn to cooperate with each other. The future could be spider's web that catches us with our incessant flapping, unless we learn that the future will be kinder to us if we learn to live and work together in harmony. we are all hostage to the same kind of fortune.

If we work together, we can reap the rewards of new discoveries - and we live in an age where new discoveries are being uncovered all the time. For instance, a team of scientists in Florida have discovered that light not only makes plants grow, but can be used to change their flavour. The different wavelengths of different colours of light affect the molecules for taste and smell. We could see this technology in our supermarkets, and even in our fridges, to get the most of our grown produce of fruit and vegetables.

Food and energy resources are the main bulk of futurists' predictions because they are important issues for our survival. But luxury items will change, too. Case in point, modern fabrics may be unrecognisable in the future. Fabrics may change their colour simply by movement, like an opalescent butterfly wing does in nature. It is also an example of the micro-structural control that will come into fabrics and textiles. They are being termed as technical textiles. Electronics may also be filtered into our clothing (glove phones are already on the market), and in the future people predict that we will see interesting materials much more responsive to light and sound being used to fashion our clothes, for the tastes dictated by the times.

Smarter windows to make us more energy efficient?

Our building materials are becoming increasingly hi-tech. Self-darkening windows have been around for a while, you can even get them on aeroplanes now. However, a new smart window made by a team of researchers in California can now control the amount of heat and light that pass through it They use a window coating made of two things. One of them is semi-conductor nano-crystals, which acts as sponges absorbing heat from the Sun's rays. The other is a special glass which can darken when a current passes through it. When the two are put together and a voltage applied to it, the amount of heat and light passing through can be controlled. If you put smart windows like this in offices, or homes, or in cars, you could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for air conditioning especially in hotter climates.

Clothing, food, gadgets - our childhood is always filled with fantastical images of the future, and one "gadget" we are always assured we'll be sharing that future with is the intelligent robot. We share our lives now with increasingly sophisticated technologies, but artificial intelligence has yet to emerge. When it does - if it does - it will mean that we shall have to learn to live in real harmony with them, too.

Over 30% of robots are currently built in Japan, and because of the Shinto religion, which believes there are spirits everywhere, people in Japan already believe robots have their own spirit, and is one reason why they are so popular and respected in that country. Living in harmony with a respect for all things is true for anything science turns from the imagination of fiction into the reality of fact.

Some robot enthusiasts still believe we are capable of creating machines that can deal with the mess and unpredictability of the real world. For instance, robots are now being built with sensors as sensitive as human touch, to make them much more useful than your average robot. It might not sound like much, but touch is essential to how we get feedback, and that is a weakness of robotics today, so a robot's sensitivity to subtle objects (such as a plastic cup) is a giant leap forward. Some have even more impressive tricks to make them alarmingly human. Some robots can now extract information from their touch, and are able to differentiate between a sponge and a stone simply by touching it. Elegant software and hardware have given robots an amazing sense of touch, an essential attribute that heralds in the humanoid robot of the future.

Naturally, a sense of touch alone won't bring about the intelligence robots we have come to know from the imagination of books and films. But a growing number of researchers are working on it. The scientists at Drexel University have set themselves an even more difficult challenge. They are working on designing a robot that can think like us. Why would we want to build robots that can think for themselves? Well, not only for the benefits they might be able to give us to help mine for resources in space and man flights into the deeper regions of the solar system, but working on them can also give us an insight into an even deeper cosmos - the mysteries of our mind.

These robots can not only help by going to places we can't go - like a nuclear disaster zone - their creation may also help us get closer to the mysteries of our own. In reality, such robots are still a work in progress. We would have expected robots to walk and use tools a long time before this, but all the human actions we make are incredibly hard for robots to replicate. We take them completely for granted, so imagine the challenge to create a robot that not only moves like us, but has the potential to think like us, as well.

Such robots may also be useful in therapeutic environments, such as with autistic children, and what is amazing, some believe, is how quickly we attribute mind and emotions to what is essentially an object, but behaves like a human - even if only remotely. So, will a robot ever be built that can do all the things we unconsciously do? Most of what we do everyday that is second nature to us is in our subconscious, and if intelligent robots are going to be part of our future, they will need to have the sophistication to understand that. It's a really important part of thinking like a human being, and some would argue that WE don't have that yet!

And if we somehow do manage to create thinking, learning artificial intelligence, will we be able to pad the years of human learning that it takes for walking, touching, and thinking into a shorter space of time? If we put aside the ethical implications until their theory becomes fact, for the initial building of such robots to be economically viable, they will need to be not only good learners, but quick ones, too. Talking about economics might seem like it cheapens the innovation of science, but throughout the centuries it has been the chase of awards and prizes that have spurred scientists on to achieve great things.

The internet was invented after such a project, so was the GPS system. Prizes have always been dangled as a carrot in science to change the direction of it, too. Look at DNA sequencing. James Watson publicly stated that he wanted to win the Nobel Prize, and that's why he decided to work on DNA, and that changed world history. So even if money isn't at the heart of most innovators, recognition is, and science prizes do mean something to those that want one. The Nobel Prize does inspire the next generation of scientists to bust open barriers and change world history.

Whatever scientists say about wanting to help the human race, most are ego-driven people. It is a self-serving attitude, but one that can ultimately provide a greater service. Yet, spurred on by teams working together for the betterment of humankind, the possibility that we may one day have a useful, functioning fully-autonomous robot remains a part of the futurists' dream.

De-constructing these dreams for a better future is a bit like de-constructing the movements we take for granted, we realise that achieving these dreams is in actuality very hard to do. The best way we will learn, as as the robots of the future no doubt will, by making mistakes. It is a massive investment into our future, and the best way to move forward will be to let our passions for a better future drive us there. It means we need to put an end to warring over superficial divisions, and begin to embrace you we really are.

As we gaze into the future, we have to recognise our diversity as a strength, when people from all races, colours and creeds can come together for the common good of the species, and of the entire planet. It is a vision of the future where humankind can overcome many of its problems to desire nothing more than a peaceful quest for knowledge, with one of its guiding principles being the peaceful coexistence of all living beings. It may sound like something out of Star Trek - or the Pixar movies - but it is a worthwhile dream. Because it's one with a future.

Yours in love,