Will You Be Celebrating Future Day This March 1st?

“The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future.” - Ray Kurzweil

In a recent post, we featured a video of a lecture by Dr. Kim Solez.  At the end of the lecture, Solez talks extensively about how a Future Day Holiday should be celebrated.  Solez recommended a celebration with color pigment being splashed everywhere, like the Indian Holi Festival of colours.  It is an interesting notion, but will it fly?

Holi Festival

The idea for a Future Day holiday arose in 2010 when Ben Goertzel put forth the suggestion at the Humanity+ Leadership gathering in Second Life.  Others like Nikki Olsen took up the challenge an have helped flesh out exactly how Future Day could materialize.  

According to Goertzel, 

Future Day, as I conceive it, is both a fun and frivolous thing and a deeply serious thing.
When I first suggested the new holiday, I was thinking about Future Day costume parties with SF movie themes … school essay contests on futuristic themes … humanoid robots giving speeches in the town square … you name it! The more I thought about it, the more possible ways to celebrate came to mind. 

After all, costume parties are great fun, but why really should we focus them on the witches and goblins that spooked the minds of superstitious medieval people? Isn’t it perhaps better to focus our imaginations on the new worlds we’re building? 

And as fun as Fourth of July fireworks are –wouldn’t it be fun to also celebrate with new and amazing technologies, instead of always focusing on blowing things up in the sky? The “rocket’s red glare” was really exciting in the late 1700s, but a lot more things are possible now. 

I’m not sure what Future Day is going to develop into, but I think it has the potential to be a heck of a lot of fun. 

But just like all our previous holidays, Future Day combines fun with a serious purpose…..

Celebrating and honoring the past, and the cyclical processes of nature, is most certainly a valuable thing. But in these days of rapid technological acceleration, it is our future that needs more attention, not our past. 

The old saw that “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” is worth keeping in mind, even though it’s true only in very limited senses (for instance, I believe that we have very little risk of reverting to medieval society, and that what risk we do have, is not closely tied to how closely we remember the nature of that society).  We don’t want to forget our roots.  But we need to pay more attention to the  important  truth that those who do not pay serious attention to their future, have much less chance of affecting it in accordance with their tastes, values and ideals. 

This is the serious theme underlying Future Day. Let’s have fun exploring all the possibilities of the future, plausible and speculative, serious and non. And let’s do our best to nudge the world to refocus its attention the future and all the possibilities it holds – and our power to shape the future, together. 

The website futureday.org has been established to socialize and communicate the holiday.  The site promotes the following:

• We would like to see Future Day adopted as an official holiday by governments on all levels around the world.
• We would like to see children do Future Day projects at school, exploring their ideas and passions about creating a better future.
• Future Day costume parties — why not? It makes at least as much sense as dressing up like witches and goblins!
• Businesses giving employees a day off from routine concerns, to think creatively about future projects
• Special Future Day issues of newspapers, magazines and websites
• Use your imagination — that’s what the future is all about!

To us it sounds like a great idea and we are on board.  Feats of strength anyone?

Future Day - A Festivus for the rest of us?