New Scientist asked what gifts three time-traveling visitors from the future should bring, if they popped up, say, when the LHC is finally turned on and starts operating. I could not resist the urge to reply. I titled my response “Hope” and wrote:
I would think that three authentic-from-the-future photographs brought by those three visitors would do nicely.
One should bear the image of a happy human in all his imperfect homo sapiens glory, such as a grinning teenager with a pimple on his nose, and no robots, genetically engineered trans-humans, or grey blobs in the background.
The second should show the image of the Earth from space: blue, white, and green in all the right places, pearls of bright cities on the night hemisphere, and nice, not too large, not too small ice caps where those should be.
The third should show another human standing in front of a window on a spaceship. Behind the human, through the window, we see the Milky Way galaxy… from the outside.