Visions 2200
It may look like the International Space Station, but it isn't. The space craft is Nautilus-X, an American concept for human exploration of the space frontier. The spacecraft was designed to enable six persons to explore space for two years. It contains a rotating torus to generate artificial gravity.
If it conforms with the pattern of recent American space visions, the space craft will never reach the vacuum of space. In contrast, some of the visions on this website may actually happen.
The visions described are seen through a figurative telescope looking two hundred years into the future. The visions hold the potential - whether desired, needed or feared - to be part of our human existence two centuries from now.
That future will retain much of the present. Thus, many visions are of preservation and enhancement. Other visions describe a frontier. That frontier may be a different way to design urban places supportive of human growth and potential. It could be the outburst of knowledge stimulated by the planets discovered orbiting neighboring stars.
Reality
Visions can motivate people to change the status quo. Such motivators should excite the human soul. ‘Gloom and doom’, although sometimes useful in showing the need for change, will seldom move enough people to actually implement change.
People respond to visions that depict an attractive future for themselves and their children. The possibilities embraced by those visions must be both optimistic and exciting. The future must be perceived to be desirable.
Technology is key to the implementation of most of these visions. If technological progress falters, for instance if no alternative source of cheap energy arises prior to the exhaustion of oil and the other fossil fuels, most of these visions will not come to pass.