Towards Kindred Futures

By Ana Sun

Ever wonder why we tend to refer to the future in its singular form in everyday speech? Why ‘the future’, and not simply ‘futures’? Considering that we can probably agree that a myriad of futures is possible before one of them falls into the present, this seems to be a mundane but overlooked mystery. 

In Futurevision: scenarios for the world in 2040, Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman observed [1]:  

There is a problem with most books about the future – and indeed, there is a fatal flaw with almost all of our thinking about what will happen next. This is because of a simple point. The fact is, there is no single future, regardless of our deepest desire that it be so, and there is no heavenly salvation in sight.

As someone who often explores progressive, positive futures within the context of climate change and social justice through science fiction, in particular Solarpunk [2], I’m intrigued: does the common view of a singular future mean we are more likely to believe that climate collapse is inevitable? Do we therefore find it difficult to imagine – and enact – alternatives? Have we inadvertently accepted a destiny described by cyberpunk, a future rocket-boosted by uncaring technology, systems of oppression and power concentrated in the hands of a few? In Zoefuturistic terms, have we simply accepted the ‘being’ and forfeited the ‘becoming’?

There’s some evidence that language can influence how we perceive time and our relationship with the future… or, rather, futures [3]. Our bodies are limited in conscious capacity, our brains constrained by how our memories are formed [4] [5] [6].

Unlike futurists and futurologists, thinking about the long-term future in its simultaneous multiplicities, especially when it comes to a complex issue such as climate change, is not something that most of us are able to conceptualise easily [7]. Sure, we may deal well enough with the immediate future, such as considering different possible routes we might take between two locations, or how we might fill the hours between morning and night on a given day. Beyond a certain timeframe, the future can resemble a different place; this afternoon, tonight, or tomorrow can easily seem like disembodied worlds beyond our reach [27]. And yet, the next second appears on the near horizon in the shadow of the following minute, then the hour thereafter – all rapidly pouring into the now, one liquid moment flowing into the next.

Perhaps there are deeper reasons for why we struggle with notions of futures in our everyday lives, and that’s worth examining. 

Caught in destiny’s net

Sometime in the early summer of 2025, after an event on climate change resilience, a frustrated attendee next to me mumbled words to the effect, “So all of it is going to end, isn’t it?” 

At the time, her blunt nihilism shocked me into silence, but that feeling of impotence is all too familiar: what’s the use of fighting if all will be destroyed in the end? If we were to believe that an impending climate collapse is destiny, we’d have already been defeated before we even began. 

One winter morning, I asked a question to an audience of about two hundred people in the middle of a talk I was giving: how did they visualise critical environmental thresholds – what we commonly call ‘climate tipping points’? The majority believed these to be a cliff-edge for survival: once we topple over the side, it’s game over. No surprise; I certainly did too, once.

In August 2025, updated analysis showed an increased risk of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapsing when researchers examined data modelling that ran for a longer timeframe until 2300 and 2500 [8]. Separately, a seventh planetary boundary – out of the nine environmental limits that demarcate the planet’s health –  has been breached this year, according to the annual assessment by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as ocean acidification transgresses the critical safe threshold for marine ecosystems [9].

All these are alarming signals designed to induce a sense of urgency and a drive to action, but taken alone without accompanying solutions, these types of headlines incite panic and breed disempowerment [10], rendering us helpless and stripped of agency while an inevitable future barrels down upon us.

The AMOC tipping point is particularly worrying because the change to humanity as we know it would be drastic. If we don’t succeed in lowering our CO₂ emissions in line with the Paris Agreement,  the current estimation is that we might pass this particular tipping point within a few decades. 

There still remains deep uncertainty whether the AMOC may weaken partially or result in a full collapse, and over what timeframe. Likely, we have at least a few decades at hand to act to avert the worst outcomes. Johan Rockström, Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said of the seventh planetary boundary breach [11]:

We’re not yet in the high-risk zone of irreversible, unmanageable change of the planet, which suggests that we can still turn this around. The window is still open even though it’s closing fast, and we have so much evidence of scalable solutions across all sectors from the food sector to the built environment to the energy transition that we can bend the curves and bring ourselves back within a safe operating space within the next decades.

Seaver Wang, the Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute wrote comprehensively about the misnomer of ‘tipping points’: 

First, the word ‘tipping’ implies the rapidity of an unbalanced cart toppling over. […] Second, the word ‘point,’ too, is bound to confuse. It implies a single, precise, known critical threshold beyond which Earth system components tip. [12]

The reality is that environmental tipping points are far more complex [13]. The Global Tipping Points Report 2023 emphasises that their assessment ‘does not suggest that crossing major tipping points could lead to runaway warming, with mitigation to prevent further tipping points being worthwhile even if some tipping points are reached. [14]’. 

We also spend so little time focusing on positive tipping points – such as those scalable solutions that Johan Rockström refers to [11] [15]. If my sample of two hundred or so attendees was anything to go by, solutions that have a positive impact aren’t something that typically crosses our minds. While our media coverage would have us imagine apocalyptic scenarios where the Earth drowns under several metres of seawater – a scenario that, in reality, is highly unlikely in the near future – the current estimates suggest that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would likely take hundreds to thousands of years to melt after their tipping points are breached [16]. The complexity in predicting circulation and heat transfers in the ocean means much is unknown; current projections, even in our worst case scenario, project sea level rise of up to 180mm by 2050 [17].

 We shouldn’t be under the impression that all is well – but there’s time to act, to reverse the damage if we could collectively grasp our agency.

Unfortunately, few narrative tools exist to remind us we are not rolling downhill off the far side of Freytag’s Pyramid into fated tragedy. Just how well science fiction is placed to shift collective imagination is still a nascent experiment [18].

Science fiction: from imaginary prediction to unintended blueprint

It might sometimes look like cyberpunk has predicted our current trajectory: a world where AI is poised to displace us, where an elite, privileged few exploit political institutions to concentrate their power, preying on people and planet to enrich themselves. 

Ursula K. Leguin famously declared [19], ‘Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.’ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discusses this at length in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [20]: ‘SF is imaginary prediction, drawing on the same sort of historical-projective suspension of disbelief as the real thing, if only to explore, to problematize, and to play with it.’

In other words, science fiction originally took on the mantle of holding up a mirror to our present from a possible future. Until recently, SF has often been written in past tense, presenting narratives as if a particular future has already happened so we could project ourselves forward in time. But how did we get from those glorious imaginary predictions to what Simon McNeil recounts as the ‘future horrors Silicon Valley merchants of human misery are trying to produce’ [21]? How did we get from Star Trek to a world where technology is threatening humanity, at the very same time as our obsession with economic growth means the planet can no longer sustain all of us?

In his epic essay The Men Who Sold the Moon, Eden Kupernmintz explains how we our current situation might have transpired [22]:  

[..] if you want to read about militarism in Heinlein’s work, you can find countless articles online on the topic, as well as on the fascism of Campbell and the many, many awful passages of Vance’s career. But consider the supposedly more progressive works of authors like Simak, Asimov, Pohl Anderson, Blish, or Roddenberry. Most, if not all, of their ideas and values are realized through individualist, liberal lenses. They are mostly concerned with heroes who uphold values such as compassion, honor, duty, and virtue. They very rarely, if ever, engage with meaningful, systematic criticisms of society. Indeed, they are perfect examples of “suburban science fiction”, importing much of the underlying, and thus powerful, presuppositions of our own society into the future. Their heroes are almost invariably male, white, abled, and dripping with machismo and “charisma”. Solutions to problems revolve around rationalism and scientism at best and downright calls for technocracy at worst. The idea of the supremacy of science, without engaging in its colonial roots, without engaging with ideas and problems like eugenics, without any meaningful critiques of its role in serving capitalism, is one of the main motivating powers of much of the careers cited above.

Kupernmintz goes on to suggest that the heroes portrayed in the Golden Age of science fiction created the archetypes upon which powerful people such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could comfortably model themselves. A challenging stance, certainly, to flatten such rich visions of the future. However, even the post-scarcity utopia depicted in Star Trek would have assumed that we continue extractive practices on Earth’s finite resources – such as precious metals and fossil fuels – for us to get there [23].

Science fiction as a genre has never set out to predict any specific future and yet here we are, witnessing what should have been cautionary tales become ingrained blueprints for the potential destruction of humanity and our living planet – adding to already debilitating helplessness, tempting us to give in to seemingly inescapable destiny. 

In recent years, we’ve seen a more significant shift of how we discuss science fiction as a mirror of our present to a vehicle for intentional imagination and activism. Roger Luckhurst in his review of Uneven Futures [24] calls it ‘a move from SF as noun to SF as verb, a set of actions, […] a move from static textual study to motivated activity that follows on from the reading of texts.’ Alongside genres such as Afrofuturism and Solarpunk, we can also observe increasing use of applied science fiction to anticipate policy risks and opportunities [25].

Even then, the question continues to plague me: might stories alone be enough? Would words on a page ultimately change how we behave, as individuals living within systems that are often out of our control? A question worth asking, considering our human physiology proves a disadvantage when it comes to thinking about the future – because of our struggle with the concept of time.

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey

In a book that’s equal parts science, philosophy and poetry, The Death of Forever, Darryl Reanney explains how time as we would commonly think of it – as a force external to us – is likely an illusion [6]:

Superficially, time is something we create when we measure it, dividing it into seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. […] Our experience of time is of something that moves, that sweeps upon its breast like a river forever moving at a constant rate from past to future.

Our sense of how time passes directly correlates to the number of instances our brains encode as new experiences; these are also how memories are formed. This is why sometimes a month can speed by, but a minute can feel eternal [26].

My favourite understanding of what happens to our sense of time – from moments to memories – comes from Daniel Kahnemann, who describes the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ [5]. The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the continuous present and knows only of the now. However, these actual moments get discarded, filtered through the ‘remembering self’, which leaves us with a cohesive picture of who we are. Kahnemann says:

Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories – it starts immediately. We don’t only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.”

Suppose a collection of these stories is how we make sense of our past, but scientists have discovered the neural pathways we use to remember the past are identical to ones we use for imagining the future. 

Professors Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday articulated the remembering-imagining system as a window where we can access everyday memories of the recent past and the near future [27]. In their research, they found that events that lie further in the future are more abstract, just as memories in the remote past become more generic; they likened it to a ‘fish-eye lens’. Interesting challenges arise when we need to think beyond the visible future [28]: 

Just as in certain areas of physics, for example, quantum mechanics, it is not possible to precisely predict a future state of a system, so with people the future is only probable. However, once a future state has come into being, it may be possible, to at least some extent, to work back to previous states. […]

Nevertheless, retrospectively reversible or not, given that there are an infinite number of indeterminate possible futures, this poses a major adaptive problem for goal-driven organisms. This is particularly so as the end point of all unrealized goals lies somewhere in the future. Indeed, in order to have a goal a future state has to be anticipated and often consciously imagined.”

While their research refers specifically to individual memory forming and goal creation, I can’t help wondering what this would mean on a collective level. More on that later.

Firstly, our actual experiences are fleeting. The moment passes and our brains form a narrative about what we thought happened – and no, it’s not necessarily reliable. Secondly, cognitive science suggests that we can only look as far into the future clearly as we are able to recall the past; beyond a certain point, the future becomes less certain and more conjecture, just as the past becomes fuzzier in our memory. If we want to determine a goal that’s beyond the boundary of the remembering-imagining system, we need to consciously imagine what we want our futures to be. But that assumes we have free will and therein lies another pitfall, a conundrum possibly best summarised by S. Pahl and colleagues [29]: 

If evidence for climate change events is difficult to retrieve from memory, climate risks will be underestimated (or biased toward very salient information or images). Moreover, information about climate change faces stiff competition from the media barrage and other daily issues that are simply more salient, compelling and urgent in demanding our attention. […] In addition, research in cognitive psychology has indicated that individuals experience less emotive mental imagery with respect to generalized long-term goals (such as living more healthily or sustainably) compared to short-term goals (such as eating a doughnut or driving to the shop), because the former are less engaging and may lack specific cues in our daily environment that trigger appropriate action (whereas a doughnut might be displayed in a shop we walk past, with additional multi-sensory cues such as smell).

In her excellent book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction, Susan Blackmore discusses the famous Libet experiments – which imply an intention to act exists before the brain is conscious of the action, therefore potentially suggesting that ‘free will’ is an illusion [4]. The idea that we don’t have free will is so antithetical to our experience that the debate surrounding interpretation of these experiments endures. However, Libet discovered that what we do have is an overriding mechanism. In Blackmore’s words, “although we do not have free will, we do have ‘free won’t’.”

On an individual level, this means we have a severe cognitive disadvantage in connecting a climate-crisis-free future to our immediate present in a way that drives positive action. The question then: how might we exercise our ‘we won’t?’

In her final chapter, Blackmore gives us a potential clue:

Some people argue that the addition of language completely transforms minds, bringing about the essentials of consciousness, including the sense of self, theory of mind and the ability to think about past and future.

The power of language, the power of becoming

You might well call to mind Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, or its film adaptation Arrival. I doubt we’d remember the future without some alien assistance in this world; however, evidence shows language can influence our perception of time, including how we might visualise time as directions. Some languages contain the sense of time in their grammar: past tense (“I went”), present tense (“I go”) and a future tense (“I will go”). English does not have conjugations, but Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese do. Other languages could be said to be ‘futureless’, where a qualifier (e.g. tomorrow, last night), when tagged onto a phrase, clarifies the sense of time; in languages such as Mandarin and German, we would say “I go tomorrow”, and it refers to a future time [3]. 

In a 2013 study, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at UCLA, concludes that speakers of ‘futureless languages’ such as German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages engaged more with the future in terms of financial savings and maintained better health, behaviours he attributes to how they don’t view the future as something separate from the present [30]. While we should be conscious that correlation never implies causation, the results are nonetheless fascinating.

We would have to make greater logical leaps to conclude if understanding our own linguistic biases would reframe our relationship to the perceived destiny of the climate crisis – and to conjure up viable alternatives. However, the field of futures anthropology might provide some useful vocabulary to unpack how we experience and envision the future, revealing how we might act in the present. Unlike Dr. Louise Banks, perhaps we don’t have to know the future to make our choices. 

From the outset of this essay, I raised the question of whether we might be treating environmental collapse as destiny, a deliberate word choice. ‘Destiny’ is one of the six orientations that Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight proposed in The Anthropology of the Future, enabling us to examine our relationship with the future – or futures – with richer nuance [31]. Other orientations include anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality and hope. 

I used the word destiny as we might do in common parlance, but also as an orientation: how a future would come to pass regardless of what happens in between, despite how we might get from here to there. The intention had been to provoke: have we simply accepted that an inequitable AI future coupled with the climate emergency would happen? Are we content to let it happen? 

The nuances of these words warrant a closer look. Expectation has a close but different nuance to anticipation: 

One may, for instance, expect rain and take an umbrella when going out ‘just in case.’ The expectation of rain, is, in this instance, still on the horizon and is tempered by, for example, weather reports that have failed in the past. […] Expectation may be viewed as a conservative teleology, one that gives thickness to the present through its reliance on the past. To anticipate rain, however, is to feel and smell it in the air, to close one’s windows and cover lawn furniture while imagining the future in the present. Anticipation slims the present, often breaking entirely with the past as it draws present and future into the same activity timespace [31].

Anticipation has a forward pull; expectation implies an action that often coincides with a notion of ‘ought’ or ‘should’. We expect that if we install solar panels, we should reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; we expect it because we’ve seen this happen before. To anticipate a world running on renewables has a forward-looking nuance, it may mean we focus on developing technologies across different types of energy generators to manage consistent power. Anticipating this kind of future gives me goosebumps. 

Speculation happens in the gap between what we expect and what we anticipate – when the end point is not clear, and when the information is partial or unavailable. For example, if the rollout of solar farms did not necessarily reduce reliance on fossil fuels, we might speculate that something has gone quite wrong with our energy governance. Or we might speculate whether we would have better success had we decided to prioritise, say, bladeless turbines. At the time of writing, the UK government is building policies on speculation: to ensure long-term energy resilience, we would need a combination of sources, including nuclear, geothermal, solar and wind [33]. The power of speculation could be that first step that creates hypotheses and assumptions against which we can create models or gather existing evidence – enabling us to make solutions real. 

Just the other day, while on a train to North Wales, I’d been struck by the number of solar farms en route; this is a new thing. Potentiality is rooted in the present, a sense that things have been set in motion, lending possibility to certain futures. Based on the view out my train window, and the offshore wind farms when I look out to the English Channel closer to home, a world running solely on a diverse range of renewables is a potentiality.

Finally, hope — a word used so often, we probably take its meaning for granted. Hope: a forward-driving force, fed by potentiality, resting on anticipation. Bryant and Knight describe hope as an orientation that ‘emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form’. But my preferred definition comes the stirring words of Rebecca Solnit [34]:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. […] Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. 

In order to evade undesirable destinies, of all the orientations available to us, I consider hope our primary vehicle. But individual hope is rarely enough – how might we bolster collective hope for collective action? 

Making future memories to remember

Summer had come early that day in May, rendering the communal meeting space warmer inside than out. As part of the cultural work around the Rights of River Charter for the Ouse, about twenty of us gathered and explored how we might strengthen our relationship to the river and channel its voice through conversation and collaborative art. In the centre of the room, an old metal bucket had been filled with river water earlier that morning; throughout the entire day, a part of the Ouse remained with us.

The inspiration and exhilaration from that one day gave birth to collective and individual memories that have since continued. Ideas flowed, creativity flourished, connections between humans and human-to-water rejuvenated. For me, the workshop sowed seeds of imagination, evoking emotions that would later make it into my writing, into the edits for my short story collection [2] that I’d been working on at the time. 

In this instance, collective memory has been instrumental in building a future-facing, positive relationship with a body of water that we have neglected for too long. Of course, collective memory could be traumatic too, as evidenced by the events around Covid-19 [35] – a global pandemic which had long been a potentiality most of us somehow ignored. To imagine desired futures, we would need to be intentional about creating collective memories so we can have rich pasts to carry forward into new futures. 

Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, wrote in his recent book How to Fall in Love with the Future [36]: 

Researchers use the term ‘mental time travel’ to describe our capacity to imagine the future – or the past – and how that capacity impacts our present-day experiences and decisions. While a lot of research has focused on individual future thought, more recently researchers have been expanding the focus of their attention to collective memory and collective future thought, or what they term ‘collective mental time travel’. 

[…] When we ‘time travel’ to the future, we dip into the cupboards of our memory, rummage around for snippets that might be useful, and then combine these snippets to create novel and unique ideas about the future. In other words, we assemble visions of the future from the resources of our past.’ 

Researchers have also found that social interaction with knowledge can shape outcomes: it could induce forgetfulness but also reinforce insights [37]. At the end of his book, Hopkins generously shares his ‘Time Machine Blueprint’ – tools to help a collective group of people mentally travel into the future. Science-fiction writers would recognise the worldbuilding; improv theatre types would recognise the set ups. 

We already have the skills and the tools to evade a destiny we don’t want. We already know how to form collective memories; we celebrate festivals, commune for conventions. As storytellers, we know what matters less is when the story is being told because our experiencing selves will forget it all. It’s about what happens after it ends – what our remembering selves will keep.

Participating in making collective memories – the conscious decision to take words off a page into our real world – charts a way forward to creating kindred futures: futures enabling us to reclaim our agency from the illusion of destiny, futures that care for people and planet.

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