What’s Your Utopia?

Imagining an ideal world can help us make this world better.

(In his famous 1516 book, Thomas More describes an ideal island society called “Utopia,” a term coined from Greek words for “no place.”)

Utopia gets a bad rap. If someone calls you or your idea “utopian,” they usually mean it as an insult, a synonym for naïve and unrealistic. But everyone, it seems to me, should envision an ideal world, one much better than ours. Even if you doubt your utopia is attainable, it can serve as a useful thought experiment. Imagine a really good world, and imagine how we can get there.

(From Scientific American, John Horgan)

For Essay 4, I want you to write a 2-3 page essay (double-spaced) in which you describe what a modern-day utopia would look like to you. This is not a satire essay–it’s a creative response that encapsulates your own worldview and projects it outward to imagine an ideal world/society (again, according to you). Also, how realistic do you think your utopia is? In other words, do you believe your vision of a “better world” is an achievable possibility, something that might be attained in your lifetime? Why or why not?