The word Utopia comes from greek eu topos, literally, not any place or no place. Since the dawn of times or more possibly, since human beings became sedentary and started to live in the messiness of cities disconnected from nature, man has been haunted by the dream of return to an "ideal" life or society.

This dream has taken many forms and has captivated the mind of philosophers, politicians and scientists like Plato in the Republic, Virgil in The Messianic Eglogue, Thomas More in Utopia. It is precisely suring the Renaissance that the idea of utopia is radically transformed thanks to the improvements brought about by the scientific revolution.

It is possible to claim that the concept of modernity is inherently utopian as it is based on the idea of infinite material progress which in light of today's environmental problems, seems very problematic. In the age of romanticism, at the beginning of the XIX century, poets and politicians wrote and wished a return to the peacefulness and ideal purity of nature as a response to the ravages of an increasing industrialised society.

In the XX century, utopianism has manifested in utterly distorted ways in Nazism, which was promoted as a utopia yet ended up in the most terrible dystopian nightmare.

The problem with utopias is that they are based on the belief that ideas live in their own world away from the physical world. Today we know that ideas are not abstract, independent entities as they are the product of our own embodied conceptualisations of reality which are the product of our interaction with the world.