About

What are the 100 objects that future historians will use to sum up our century? Smart drugs that change the way we think? A fragment from terrorist bomb detonated in Shanghai? A wedding ring between a human and an AI? The world’s most expensive glass of water, returned from a private mission to an asteroid?

This website will explore what the future might hold for us, not just in technology and science, but also religion, advertising, wars, economics, and politics. Each object will tell its own story, of individuals and families, and of countries, continents, and entire worlds.

A new object will be added at least one a week, and I’ll also be producing a podcast of selected objects, along with a newspaper ‘from the future’ and a book when the project is finished.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects was made possible by the generous support of my backers via Kickstarter. You can see a list of the people who contributed in the Acknowledgements.

Inspiration

The idea for this project came from A History of the World in 100 Objects, a fantastic BBC Radio 4 series in which Neil MacGregor from the British Museum picked 100 objects to describe the epic sweep of human history. Across a hundred 15-minute shows, it covered everything from a two million year-old Olduvai stone chopping tool, to the Rosetta Stone from 196 BC, to a credit card from 2009 AD.

I’m deeply influenced by sci-fi authors like Neal Stephenson, Iain Banks, and Kim Stanley Robinson – but most of all, Vernor Vinge. I’m also inspired by In Our Time, The Long Now Foundation, Civilization (the game), and a whole host of other blogs and books.

About the Author

I’m Adrian Hon. I’m the co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, a games company that storylike games and gamelike stories for companies like the BBC, Disney, Channel 4, Microsoft, Death Cab for Cutie, and Penguin Books. We’ve won many awards such as Best of Show at SXSW and our work has been exhibited at MOMA. In my rapidly-diminishing spare time I write about technology for The Telegraph and I run Transmedia London.

Previously, I studied neuroscience at Cambridge, Oxford, and UCSD, and was the co-author of a NASA award-winning website on astrobiology. And I spoke at TED about Mars exploration.