The other day my math teacher was telling our class about a tribe of
people, that had lived isolated from the rest humanity. When somebody
"discovered" them, they figured out that these people couldn't
comprehend any numbers past 3 or 4, I don't remember which one. If you
put five apples in front of one of these people they could see all the
apples, but they couldn't count them.
I think this applies to some of what we talked about in class because
currently our images of the future are limited to only imagining
futures that we can currently perceive. Just like there are endless
amounts of numbers, their are endless amounts of potential ways the
furture can be. If someone in that tribe of people imagined the number
five, and tried to tell his people about it they might think he had
gone mad. If he could get others to understand the number five, then
who knows maybe they would get real radical and come up with the number
six, and so on.