There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters to the future, then publish them in Time magazine as part of an ad campaign. In fact, that time wasn’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be precise, when no less an optimistic (or optimistically bleak?) novelist than Kurt Vonnegut was still active. At some point between writing Bluebeard and Hocus Pocus, he composed a missive directed toward humanity a century hence (in 2088), which you can read even in this relatively early year of 2024here.
Vonnegut begins with quotations from Shakespeare and St. John the Divine, explaining that “our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation.” In his time, we knew full well “how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?”