The future keeps happening

Part II

Growing up I figured out New Years Eve was a big night and I wanted to stay awake until midnight. Who wants to sleep through the greatest party on the planet?

Once my parents decided I was old enough, I was there for all the things we do at the stroke of midnight - resolutions, singing, kissing, fireworks, confetti, and of course, the countdown.

A few years later, just before midnight, I snuck out of the party zone, went upstairs to my room and sat on my bed. I looked at my watch count down the seconds and then I closed my eyes. Waiting for the magic. Something to feel different. A change in the force.

I opened my eyes in the new year. No magic. Dangit! Next year I’d keep my eyes closed longer.

But really, it is magic. Turn the page, take a breath, reflect. This year is going to be different than last year. This year I’m going to X or not do Y.

What actually happens in 2025 may not be what you plan, but it doesn’t matter. This is a moment to be supremely hopeful for the future.

The fun of writing a New Year’s article isn’t about making predictions - that’s tricky - but rather looking back at what you wrote last year. It’s a marker - what even was I thinking 365 days ago? Now that I’ve now been writing TechTales for over a year (this is my 83rd post), for the first time I can look back and read what I wrote last year.

One year ago in Part I of The future keeps happening, I felt like I should try to predict something so I went out on a limb and talked up last April’s full solar eclipse. Did you catch it? We missed it, but there’s still time to book Greenland or Iceland or Spain and see the next one in August 2026.

Apart from the eclipse, I was excited by the accelerating pace of innovation in tech and - since I left the grind - my newfound ability to keep up with it. One year later, I’m still excited, particularly about advances in AI, Space and Energy.

Man did I luck out with AI bursting on the scene just as I was emerging from retirement hibernation to sit back down at a keyboard.

Last year I wrote a fair bit about AI. That’s going to keep happening, it’s amazing.

Quantum computing is related and also amazing. AI and Quantum are seminal advances in the tech I worked on for 30 years and I feel in my bones just how significant they are. Google recently published a magnificently frothy press release about their new quantum chip Willow. It solved a problem that only a computer could love in under 5 minutes. That wouldn’t be very impressive except that the biggest, baddest, supercomputer we have would have taken 10 septillion (10²⁵ ) years to solve that same problem.

Google then went frothy squared, citing this as evidence we are living in a multiverse.

I’m not sure about the multiverse, but you can increasingly say we’re living in the future. On Christmas eve we sent a spaceship through the Corona of the Sun blazing through 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and screaming by at over 100 miles per second - faster than anything we’ve ever made.

Conceptual image shows Parker Solar Probe about to enter the solar corona. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ben Smith

A growing wave of space missions is ramping up. For the first time in over 50 years we’re getting ready to send people back up to the moon and the larger plan is to colonize Mars. Building on the booster grab that changed history, SpaceX is ratcheting up their launch schedule of their big rocket Starship. The seventh flight is next week featuring the new Starship design Block 2.

Just as Quantum is the yin to AI’s yang. Energy is to Space. Learning about the sun leads to the promise of fusion while solar energy output is increasing and will soon eclipse fossil fuels.

I just learned about the Dyson Sphere and while today it’s more sci-fi than science, maybe it’s our future. Dyson Spheres are megastructures built in space surrounding a star to capture it’s energy without messing about with stuff on planets.

We’ve actively looked for Dyson Sphere’s to prove aliens are out there. The premise is that to support a technologically advanced civilization such megastructures would have to be built to harvest the energy from the stars.

That’d be something.

So, for TechTales in 2025, more on these themes.

Also meta. While I like to think I write mainly about these areas of tech, in reality I write a lot of meta stories that take up residence in my head - fever dreams combining the now with the then. Or, like the Dyson Sphere, a future then with the now.

More meta coming here in 2025. I hope you keep reading and I hope you have an amazing 2025.

Ok, I do have one prediction. Close your eyes, and visualize your best 2025. I mean your best year ever. Make it vivid, including how you want to feel. Put your brain on notice - this is what you expect of it. I predict that it happens.

best, Andrew