Created 13/11/2011 10:21:04 AM

The world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems (Glen, 2011).

Most of the times, our images of the future are based on personal assumptions or preferences we have about the future. As the students of Strategic Foresight we need to come to more documented images that may be made by surveys or data-based forecasts. Jerome C. Glenn (2011) as the director of UN's Millennium Project since 1996 publishes the State of the Future annual reports. Recently, he has given a useful image of the world that is before us in this manner:

"If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, unemployment, and disease continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine an unstable world with catastrophic results.

Yet, if current trends in self-organization via future Internets, transnational cooperations, material science, alternative energy, cognitive science, inter-religious dialogues, synthetic biology, ICT, and nanotechnology continue and converge over the next 50 to 100 years, it is easy to imagine a world that works for all."

As we see, the future of the world depends again on our today actions. We are faced with a number of realities that make it really difficult to say whether we are heading for a better or a worse world. For instance, most economies are growing but with little increase in employment.

What is not clear is whether the world will make good decisions on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges. According to Glenn (2011), the key question for future to address is: Can civilization implement solutions fast enough to keep ahead of the looming challenges?

Glenn (2011) has suggested a global collective intelligence system to track all science and technology advances, forecast consequences, and document a range of views so that politicians and the public can understand the potential consequences of new science and technology. We may name Glenn's suggested body: "the global think tank".

In the classic formulation of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Auguste Comte, humankind was already entering the "positive" age, the age of science, industry, and commerce (Wagar,1991). Regardless of any kind of optimism we may have in our views concerning the future of the world, it seems that human beings are experiencing an era of mental evolution and wisdom that will affect the future.

Lombardo (2006) believes that mental evolution will accelerate more quickly than our present materialistically focused evolution. As our evolution speeds up, we will approach an asymptote of the evolutionary process, “a white hole in time” or “omega point,” where human consciousness will achieve a sense of eternity and cosmic oneness.

Perhaps Glenn's global think tank may find a meaning in that time.          

References:

Glenn, J. C. (2011). Global Situation and Prospects for the Future, in WFS 2011 conference volume: Moving from Vision to Action, Bethesda, MD: World Future Society. pp. 3-18.

Lombardo, T. (2006). Contemporary Futurist Thought: Science Fiction, Future Studies, and Theories and Visions of the Future in the Last Century. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.

Wagar, W. W. (1991). The next three futures: Paradigms of things to come. New York: Praeger. p. 165.