2100.org

While it may be difficult to foresee the future this is not a sufficient reason to avoid discussing it. In fact, everyone takes decisions based on their own particular vision of the future, but this vision is usually intuitive and often implicit. Futurology is concerned with constructing a vision so that the bases of decisions are more obvious and better understood by those making them.

This study is the result of ten years' work involving many hundreds of specialists. However the actual method used is simple and applicable to any subject. It consists of three stages :

1)- documentation; gathering the relevant data, covering the present and current research, as well as the past. This requires a high standard of professionalism by historians and researchers.

2)- discussion ; experts and researchers tend to commit only a small part of their ideas and thoughts to paper. To fully draw out their thinking, they need to have their theories challenged and ideas confronted. Even more importantly, they need to be prevailed upon to participate in drawing up a chart of future developments, so that it represents their ideas.

3)- conceptualization. Next, contributors need to work in small groups of not more than 3 and regain their freedom of thought to develop structured concepts able to explain past and future in unison.

If this process produces unsatisfactory results, with many issues unresolved or untenable in the light of criticism then this suggests that the more pertinent phenomena were not focused upon. If so, one needs to recommence the complete cycle of documentation - discussion - conceptualization, but using different bases.

If on the contrary a clear vision, which is more than just a collection of shared points of view and which stands up to criticism, has been developed then the major part of the work has been completed. All you now need to do is to set yourself a deadline, otherwise, past experience has shown, new factors and ideas crop up constantly. If you just let your mind follow its natural inclination, the job will never be finished.

As we can be no more certain than anyone else of the future, I begin this essay with a scenario. I hope you can share the analysis which follows and will want to take part in preparing the necessary consequent decisions. If you agree, do participate to the building of our 12+1 programs for next century.