• Think about your favorite representations of time in pop culture – movies, music, books, etc. to share next week. Historical dramas? Sci Fi? Bring it in!

Memento - Film, 2000, Christopher Nolan

Memento is a film I watched a long time ago, so I don't remember all the details, but it depicts the main character chasing the clues of the case and finding his wife's murderer. A critical element associated with "Time" at the center of the story is that he can only hold on for a moment. He has short-term amnesia, so he only has 10 or 20 minutes of "current" time. To follow the clues, he leaves clues by engraving the information he remembers on his body and relies on the clues he perceives to track the information of events in the past time, cashing backward in chronological order. When the investigation makes progress, the results are engraved, and so on. The film also consists of two plots of time flow, one showing the story going back in time in the order he follows, and the other puts the fragments of the current memories that he exists in the order of time we(audiences) perceive. So, the film shows the passage of time facing each other in opposite directions, and at the same time, it also implies the notion of the fragmented time of a one-off current state. First, in terms of time, this movie gave me a very fresh shock as an audience member—the time we generally perceive toward the future. Throughout the film, I had to arrange the time back and forth to understand the story and, at the same time, to sympathize with the current time zone that the main character was going through. Above all, the thing is that the protagonist, who can only recognize the time of the current, does not forget his beloved existence and the anxiety he feels in the process of exploring the world beyond the limits of his current perception. The only reliable being is himself, which he has left behind. Second, in the process of trying to find out the world that he does not recognize by following only a tiny faint thread, it makes me think about what we are doing in anticipation of the time we perceive and the time we do not recognize (the future for now).

Doctor Who - TV Show, Sci-Fi, 2005~

This TV series is a show that I've been very hooked on for a while. Going back to the past and future? There is the TARDIS, the most attractive transportation, and the machine at the center of Doctor Who! It has the appearance of a phone booth, but when our protagonists go into it, the space expands beyond the laws of physics that we understand in this world, leading us to a large room inside the spacecraft. The concept of TimeMachine could sound like a little cliché. Still, the interesting story with characters who experience small historical events through a trip to the past and the future to a long journey to solving huge events throughout the season gives us excitement. Not only the limit of time but also the concept of Tardis' expansion of space was impressive to me.

A common thing I come up with in Memento and Doctor Who or any other content dealing with different timelines is how we perceive time. How deep do we go into that time and feel, recognize, or stop? Can we feel more or less time flow than that based on the objectified time divided by seconds and minutes? Contemplation. I think how much we want to take and contemplate seems to be our perception towards the time currently living in the 21st century. We used to conceptualize time accordingly to control and manage it by focusing on our labor and the harvest of our products in the past and today. I think today, and in the near future, the focus is shifting a little more to the inner side of individuals, trying to digest and use the outside time as our own. And I think we are satisfied with ourselves when we feel the time toward our inner side. I think that's why people focus on the idea of increasing or decreasing time. We seem to want to stretch or jump time. Is it because of the desire to make the moment we love our lives more breathable and more valuable?

• Draw in your prediction for the future of humanity on this chart. Post (or bring in) for us to compare next week.

In my thought, it's going to shrink exponentially. Instead of considering humans as entities, if we look at them as families, there was a time when we sought to expand the family members. I believe there was also an instinctive desire to survive that encouraged increasing their numbers and trying to leave their families for a long time. There were many people dying from illness and war; it could be one of the reasons. In the Industrial Revolution era, people expected machines to replace human jobs, but more jobs were created, and the population grew rapidly. New science and technology give us the power to fight off disease and prolong life, which cannot be ignored. But in the future, we may try to give birth to less. I expect jobs to disappear. Of course, there will be many new jobs, but we will unlikely need a large population. I think people want to live in a more spatial place, enjoying fresh air and nature. Maybe if the population doesn't decrease, we're going to move to another level of Earth or another planet to get more space. So I'm predicting that the number of people per area will decrease anyway. So if we have a population of 1,000 or 2,000 people per family, I think only a few people can form that family in the future. I can see that there's a person who lives alone in a quiet farmhouse. The person is introduced to their future partner on a quiet beach far away in search of a mate through an AI program, only because of the small remaining obligation to continue the human family. Of course, they might want communication that only humans can exchange. They live in the house with robotic servants and friends. I don't know what's going to be good and bad about these changes in our lifestyle. Ha ha.