At the end of the day, I looked at my options. I wanted to be in the NBA. I wanted to pursue my dream. It was my choice. But sometimes, just for fun, I think about how it would've been if I'd stayed in college.
As one looks back over history it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if individuals or nations had acted differently in certain crises. I often wonder if these speculations will serve to give any of us more courage in facing new situations!
Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.
For most of human history, there was a ruling class and then there was everybody else. If you were part of everybody else, it wasn't your job to imagine a different future, different ways of doing things. So, imagination is a fairly modern phenomenon.
History does not disclose to us its alternatives.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
Was there any danger I could have gone down a different path were it not for boxing? Of course.
If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ...
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't become an actor. If perhaps I'd stayed on at university and become an academic.
Our society's youth will grow up knowing that tomorrow can be better, that there are alternatives for the future, that there are living, breathing humans of all colors and creeds out there in the sky building new worlds.
Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
Most farmers know that their children's future will probably not be in agriculture, but they have a hard time imagining a different life.
"Hard" science fiction probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.
TV was not in my future, not in my mind's eye.
We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.
I'm very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn't choose.
I obviously pursued a career in the arts but always wondered if I had just been supported a little more in math, as opposed to it being 'a thing I had to learn,' how that would have changed things for me.
I didn't want to be an actress. I wanted to be a dentist, but you never know what life will bring you.
On some planet, I probably could have been a lawyer. On some planet, I could have been somebody in advertising.
There remains, however, the hope, at least in Russia, that, as sometimes happens in history, the memory of lost alternatives will one day inspire efforts to regain them.
We need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies - images of potential tomorrows.
Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.
What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
