I invite you to write a letter to your future self in 2049. Your composition might respond to following questions: 

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Who are you now?

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What have you already accomplished? What are the milestones in your life that you've already reached and identify as key to your own success?

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What do you hope for in the best possible future? Many things might go wrong but some things will go right.

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What do you fundamentally believe to be true currently? How might that change? What could possibly change it?

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What invention or development would fundamentally alter not just your life but the nature of society itself?

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What skills, talents and traits do you want to develop over the next 25 years? What could you accomplish if you focused on it for that amount of time?

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Finally, considering we change as we grow older and who we once were, we are no longer, what one message would you want to send to your future self to remind them of who you are and what you believed?

The year 2049 holds special resonance for the Berggruen Institute. The original 1982 Blade Runner was filmed in part at our headquarters in the Bradbury Building, a cyberpunk architectural legacy. In the dilapidated halls, we meet the engineer J. F. Sebastian who creates automata, mechanical dolls that imitate human beings. It is unclear if the protagonists of film and its sequel Blade Runner 2049 are human themselves, a conundrum that peaks when (in the original film), detective Rick Deckard confronts Roy Batty, a bioengineered humanoid. In his death soliloquy, the replicant reflects that all his experiences will soon be “moments lost in time, like tears in rain.” We are compelled to consider if the feelings of love, regret, and other passions are felt only by human beings, or if they extend to machines.

As in the sequel film, 2049 is also a year that provides an anchor that casts our present time forward to the edge of imaginability: it is not tomorrow, nor next week, filled with emails and dog walks and the languid slump of your wife's stomach against the small of your back in the buttery blue morning; neither is it a century or millennia later, a nebulous elsewhen that will be determined by a robust reversal of planetary destruction.

In 2049, NASA's outer space missions to Titan or Enceladus will have returned detailed images of possible indications of life back to Earth. The bristlecone pine named Methuselah on Nevada's borderlands will have added more rings to its 4,789-year dotage. Two generations of North American cicadas will have entombed themselves for thirteen years, emerging for a few short weeks in an explosive mating cacophony.

I look forward to reading!

Sincerely,
Diotima
Archivist of the Future Wunderkammer