But What If We're Wrong?

But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman (2016)  This book is subtitled: “Thinking About The Present As If It Were the Past”—its basic premise, more or less—is a lot of speculating about how people in the distant future will see the time we are living in now. In my first year of college I had a class called “Current Topics in Astronomy” and the professor started out by saying that 90 percent of the stuff we would discuss will be proven wrong. I don't think I'd ever heard something like that at that time and I still think about it. This book goes into a lot of speculating about everything from science to pop-culture, mostly in a pretty easy to understand and often pretty breezy and humorous way. I had a lot of fun reading it, and it made me look at lot of things differently. It doesn't feel like anywhere near the last word on this subject, of course, but it's a great way to get you thinking in this direction, which I think is important for people to do, to some extent. If nothing else, it's strangely more comforting than disorienting, at least to me. I'm someone who is aways going around talking about stuff like how I think future society will look back at us and see the plague of automobiles as one of the tragedies of the 20th century, so yeah, this is kind of the book for me, but I think anyone who likes to think about things will like it.