The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in spacetime.

Robin Hanson, The rapacious hardscrapple frontier, in Damien Broderick (ed.) Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, New York, 2008, pp. 168–189, p. 168