Importance of Future Studies

I absolutely love your organization and its expressed purpose. I feel encouraged to be able to join such an important group of like-minded individuals.

Ever since I was a small child, the inequity of existence has become more and more obvious to me, as I have continued to learn about life and the universe in which we live. As I reached my college years, it became clear to me that this inequity actually leans heavily on the “wrong” side of things, in my humble opinion. I had an astronomy teacher relate to me a few eye-popping statistics that still resonate with me — that of the 600+ man-made satellites orbiting the Earth, only about 12-20 of them actually look out into space. In addition, even though we are 100% certain that a Near Earth Object (NEO) of sufficient size would wipe out not only humanity but most of the rest of life on Earth as well, we still choose to dedicate less than 0.01% of our GNP as a nation to efforts aimed at identifying such objects and developing solutions to the massive problem.

This sad reality of the way science is funded in the present day crushed my dreams of becoming a theoretical cosmologist. At that time, cosmology was thought of as little more than theoretical physics combined with fortune-telling (we had virtually no data with which to compare against theory). The more I learned about the Health Care industry, the more I realized that the selective funding of only politically useful or provocative topics is pervasive throughout the scientific community. At the time I first explored your site (about 30 minutes ago) it dawned on me that this pattern of who gets the money and who doesn’t, actually extends into the study of the future versus the study of the past.

I asked myself, how many Futurist programs exist in universities nation-wide versus History programs? How does the funding match up? How many students are compelled to take History classes for which they will never have any useful need? The answers, which are pretty clear to anyone who has recently gone through the college experience in the United States, lean heavily towards History and against Futurists. In fact, I graduated with a degree in Global Studies, and that is probably the best analogue for a Futurist degree I can think of, because it is dedicated to studying the effects of the current trends in globalization and looking ahead to see what will be happening in the near future. The unfortunate part, besides the lack of funding for Future Studies as a serious academic discipline, is the lack of understanding (or purposeful belittling) of the importance of Future Studies. I’m not saying it is the most important field of study, but that we could probably use a lot less random Historical societies that play no active part in shaping the future and a lot more futurist groups like WFS.

Thanks for taking the time to read my little rant. I look forward to joining WFS and interacting with some like-minded individuals.

Joshua Gottlieb
Universal Sports