What Do We Mean by “The Future”?

A bus, a stranger, and a question about time, information, and the observer.

A few days ago, after leaving a hospital appointment, I decided to walk instead of taking the bus.

The consultation had ended with the news that I would soon undergo a second corneal transplant. Although it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I still needed time to absorb it. Walking has always been how I think. Even in the middle of a heatwave, I found myself choosing the longer way home.

As I crossed the road outside the hospital, I noticed a woman waiting quietly at a bus stop. There was nothing remarkable about the scene, and I simply kept walking.

A few minutes later, as I reached the next junction, I saw a bus turning up the hill. Because of where I was standing, I could already see it. She couldn’t.

Then, almost without thinking, a strange question appeared in my mind.

Had I just seen her future?

At first, the answer seemed obvious.

Of course not. I wasn’t predicting anything. I simply happened to be standing somewhere that gave me access to information she did not yet have. But the thought refused to leave.

Suppose, instead, that I had called her at that very moment.

“Your bus is coming. It’s blue. The upper deck is almost full.”

A few seconds later, everything I had described would become part of her own experience. To her, I would have been describing the future. To me, I was simply describing the present.

The bus itself was never in the future.

Only her experience of it was.

That small moment made me wonder whether we often confuse two very different ideas: something that has not yet happened, and something that has already happened but has not yet reached us.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Imagine a medical test. The laboratory has already completed the analysis. The doctor already knows the result. Yet the patient will not receive the phone call until tomorrow.

Where does that diagnosis belong? Is it still the future? Or does it already exist, while only the patient’s awareness remains behind?

The same happens every day in ways we rarely notice. A football match reaches television viewers several seconds after the players have already celebrated a goal. Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth. The galaxies astronomers observe tonight often appear as they were millions or even billions of years ago.

Our knowledge of the universe has always depended on information travelling through space. Perhaps this is more than a curious coincidence. Perhaps every observer experiences reality through the arrival of information.

This made me think differently about the present itself.

Maybe the present is not a universal moment shared equally by everyone. Maybe what we call the present is constructed from the information available to each observer.

If two people standing only a few metres apart can experience different presents, then what exactly is the future?

Perhaps the word future quietly gathers together several completely different ideas. Sometimes it means something that genuinely has not happened. Sometimes it describes something that already exists but has not yet reached our awareness. Sometimes it refers to events that are still uncertain, yet can already be anticipated from the information we have.

Our language treats them as though they are the same.

Perhaps they are not.

Interestingly, this question reminded me of one interpretation in modern physics.

In one interpretation of relativity, sometimes called the block universe, time does not necessarily flow from past to future. Instead, every event already exists as part of a four-dimensional spacetime, while our conscious experience moves through it one moment at a time.

Whether this picture of reality is correct remains an open question.

I don’t know whether this is how the universe works. But it offered me another way of thinking about the nature of the future.

It raises an interesting possibility.

If a different observer could somehow access a larger portion of spacetime than we can, would they appear to know the future? Or would they simply be seeing parts of reality that we have not yet experienced?

Perhaps what we call the future says as much about the observer as it does about time itself.

The bus arrived.

The woman stepped forward and climbed aboard. Within seconds, the ordinary street became ordinary again.

She would never know that a stranger across the road had spent the next hour thinking about those few unremarkable moments.

Neither of us had changed the world.

The only difference between us was where we happened to be standing.

Yet that small difference left me wondering whether the future is truly something waiting to happen, or whether it is, at least sometimes, simply a name we give to reality before it reaches us.