Tomorrow Project Anthology: Living Tomorrow

In a world of urgent problems and exciting possibilities brought about by scientific and technological innovation, what we imagine in our individual and collective consciousness often helps clarify and contextualize what we can create, build, or bring to life in the domain of real, the actual, the physical.

This is paradoxical dialectic-how the imaginary nourishes reality, which in turn inspires and ignites the imagination-is an essential feature of our times. Designers, engineers, and scientists are front-line players in the construction of our built world. Yet these makers of material worlds are shaped and re-shaped by the collective imaginations of artistic and literary folk-the pure dreamers.

That we imagine our worlds before we build them is a truism of the human condition. So these stories collected here, written by young people engaged with the prospects for science and technology, represent one kind of rehearsal or anticipation for facing the future in all its messy reality.

All eleven of these stories imaginatively deal with the social implications and political consequences of future advances in the application of the concepts and methods of biology and the related disciplines of physics, chemistry, computer science, and bioengineering to solve or attempt to solve real-world problems. Whether through advances in gene therapy, human genetic and prosthetic modification, pharmaceutical treatments, or renewable energy, each story creatively dramatizes technological and scientific challenges that may await future generations and future worlds.