What Will the World Look Like in the Morning?

How will the world look in the morning? It all depends on what you were thinking about today.

As we all work to make our dreams into realities, there is a pattern that eludes our vision because the final pattern is the result of so many different individuals with so many different visions who are all acting independently. So when we see the final product there is some of our handiwork in there, plus bits of what everyone else is doing.

Visions of the future are rarely unanimous because everyone looks at it from different angles.

Look at how the Internet has evolved. It went from being a way for academic and military researchers to share information to being a place for everyone.

We use it to exchange personal messages with friends, to set up a place to shop for products we want, a place to look for work or create our own work. It is a place for artists, writers and musicians to show their work to the world without going through an agent, gallery or corporation. It is a place to research anything.

Its immense popularity then created new problems. Once these avenues were opened up that let anybody create any kind of website and put it out there, the next thing that happened was that the person searching has to wade through all kinds of stuff to find what they want. And the person posting has to learn all kinds of tricks to get people to come to their website.

The web is the biggest single example in the world of people all over the planet with competing and conflicting visions all working together without really working together.

Old myths often speak of order being created out of chaos, and here we have right in front of us a perfect example of that. And of course, it is not done yet. It is still order emerging from chaos.

There is something goofily ironic about the fact that at a time when some politicians are proposing to do away with Medicare that the topic most searched for was Charlie Sheen's drunken buffoonery. And now while there is still much confusion in the world about the uprisings in Arab countries and more jabbering instead of decisive leadership in the field of increasing our ability to develop and use solar, wind and geothermal energy to replace fossil fuels, among the most researched topics today were Chastity Bono's sex change operation, Schwarzenegger's divorce and the trial of a mother who murdered her daughter.

Perhaps the explanation is simply that people love a good story, and as tragic as it sounds, what all this may tell us is that people who tell stories about developing better sources of energy are not telling stories nearly as well as the people telling these other stories. I think that in order to make real progress in the world, we need better storytellers.

What will the world look like in the morning?