IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE (isn't everything?)

Pick any film, TV show, videogame whatever that is set in the future, as far into the future as you can think, usually those products will be several hundred years into the future. For some reason, when telling a story set in the future, we seem to be afraid to explore the far future, i'm talking thousands of years into the future, if not millions, so why is that? My theory is that we imagine if we go too far into the future, it'll become less relatable, we imagine humanity will have evolved both mentally and physically to the point where they would seem as a completely different species. Usually products set into the future are used to reflect something of our own civilisation, environmental messages, issues of prejudism, etc, so we imagine if we were to travel 100,000 years into the future, all of those problems will be obsolete or we'd be dead. The oldest film that I could find was Wizards (1977) set in the year 2,004,977, and before that was Dune (1984) in 21,592, that's a near 2 million gap, and before Dune is Journey to the Center of Time (1967) in the year 6,000, leaving huge gaps of human history to work with. The same can be said for videogames, the furthest game that I could find (And i doubt anything could overtake it) is Boombots (1999) set in the year 15,000,000 but of course that's a comedy game, not meant to be taken seriously, most videogames cut off around 2,500. (For more information on videogames, check out Game Theory's take on it here). As for television, the furthest that a show has gone, (and again, nothing will top it) is Doctor Who, who once literally travelled to the end of time, we're not given a specific date, we just know it takes place trillions of years in the future. However, Doctor Who has done this before, back in 2005 when the series was brought back to television, on his first outing to the future he goes to the year 5,000,000,000, where the last "pure" human is nothing more than a rug of skin with a face on it.

Thing is, most experts would try and predict the future only by a few decades, meaning that no one knows what's going to happen 100,000 years in the future, billions of variables could change humanity, meaning writers could literally do whatever they want, invent whatever they want, make whoever they want. Yet we seem to be stuck in the rut of doing things only a few hundred years, too afraid to try anything new. So i say if you're planning on making a film set in the far future, try experimenting with it, and pick a time that hasn't been done yet, see what you come up with.

-Danny