A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DUNK
CHAPTER VI: WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
We have investigated the slam dunk from its humble origins predating even the Big Bang to its present-day status as one of sports’ most exciting feats. Every iota of knowledge on the subject of dunking has been presented. There truly is no more to say about dunks as we know them or as they were known to inhabitants of previous eras. Thus, dear reader, we must look beyond the present time, into the uncertain haze of the future, to hypothesize on what dunks will look like ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand years from now.
The maximum level of human athleticism is constantly rising due to improvements in nutrition science and training regimens. Elite athletes twenty years from now will doubtlessly be capable of more than the elite athletes of today. We will have faster runners, higher jumpers, and stronger lifters. But this will have little effect on dunking; players might get higher on their dunks or jump from further away, but not to the degree where a three-point dunk can be performed. Additionally, there are unlikely to be any technological achievements which alter the dunking landscape.
Let us extend our forward-looking gaze to the next century. Ten decades of athletic improvements will have yielded the ability to dunk on a fourteen-foot rim, but dunking is still rare enough among the general populace that basketball rims will remain at their customary ten feet. However, robotic implants in human limbs have augmented humanity’s collective athleticism and propelled it to new heights. Relying on the natural actions of our muscles, these implants amplify what our bodies already do. Neither the high school game nor the professional game (the college game has long since been dismantled) allow these implants in their players, but independently-run amateur leagues featuring players so implanted begin to gain large followings. The rims in these games are set at fifteen feet, and there is very little jumpshooting; most plays involve a series of in-air alley-oop passes attempting to get a player open for a dunk. Astute readers will note that this new “dunkball” is the spiritual successor to the unheralded and forgotten “slamball”, which was played in trampolines in the early 2000’s to audiences of a few hundred.
Predictably, the accelerating pace of technology extended over a thousand years results in a collective humanity that hardly resembles the ambulant creatures of flesh and bone which are so familiar to us today. In the year 3000, there are no more humans as we know them; just humanoid robots with all imperfections eliminated. Emotions and independent thought are still present, and indeed flourish once the limitations of the human body have been removed. Basketball is played wherever there are “humans” present, for they have now colonized hundreds of planets across the galaxy. Each planet develops its own style based on the local gravity; Earth basketball is played on a court two hundred yards long, with rims twenty feet in the air. Thanks to the uniform athleticism afforded by the robo-suits, every man, woman, and child is blessed with the ability to dunk a basketball. BoingVert has been out of business for seven hundred years.
It is impossible to predict where the dunk will proceed from there. In a post-human era, dunking might grow in scale to include whole planets, or it might shrink in scale to create nano-dunking at the molecular level. Or, robo-humanity might lose its interest in sports, and the slam dunk will be just a minor footnote in history.
One thing we can say for sure: 2016 will forever be considered a golden age of the slam dunk.