January-February 2010
January-February 2010 (Volume 43, No. 6)
2020 Visionaries
Don’t be alarmed, but the next 10 years could be the most significant in the history of the human race. The unsolved problems of the last century have grown in size and urgency. In a series of essays to run in this magazine throughout 2010, we hope to bring you some answers. In this first series of essays, we tackle health and education.
Andrew Hessel showcases his vision for open-source drug manufacturing and noted nanoscientist. Robert Freitas details the medical future of nanorobotics. Janna Anderson and Mark Bauerlein — present two distinct visions for education in the twenty-first century.
Foresight Conquers Fear of the Future
By Edward Cornish
“I’m scared,” the young man confessed. “I’m starting my eighteenth year in a world that makes no sense to me. All I know is that this world I’m living in is a shambles and I don’t know how to put it together.” ... Today’s youth are growing up in the midst of radical social and economic transformations. Now is the time to develop the most critical skill for effectively managing their careers and personal lives: Foresight.
The Dymaxion Dream Reincarnate
By Cynthia G. Wagner
One could not help but smile when Volkswagen introduced its trim little concept car, the L1, at the 2009 auto show in Frankfurt. Smile, with nostalgia for futures past … and for visionary inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. The future is, and has been for some time, streamlined.
Stewart Brand’s Environmental Heresies
Futurist and ecologist Stewart Brand believes that the Green movement must move swiftly and decisively to embrace technological solutions to climate change—several of which many leading environmentalists have spent their careers campaigning against—including nuclear energy, genetic modification, mass urbanization, and geoengineering. Review by Aaron Cohen.
Collecting Wisdom about the Future
In October 2008, major U.S. financial institutions crashed, and economies around the world went into recession. In March 2009, an asteroid passed within 77,000 kilometers of Earth; had it made impact, it would have obliterated all life within an 800-square-kilometer area.What do these two events have in common? According to Millennium Project scholars Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu in the 2009 State of the Future, both were near-total surprises. Review by Rick Docksai.
Tomorrow in Brief
- Sustainable Sources of Biofuels
- Musical Detection Software
- Can Happiness Be Acquired?
- Long-Term Impacts of Bad Shoes
- Pollution without Borders
- WordBuzz: Genobility
World Trends & Forecasts
How to Feed Eight Billion People
By Lester R. Brown
The world is entering a new food era. It will be marked by higher food prices, rapidly growing numbers of hungry people, and an intensifying competition for land and water resources that crosses national boundaries when food-importing countries buy or lease vast tracts of land in other countries. Because some of the countries where land is being acquired do not have enough land to adequately feed their own people, the stage is being set for future conflicts.
The Post-Scarcity World of 2050
By Stephen Aguilar-Millan, Ann Feeney, Amy Oberg, and Elizabeth Rudd
The world between 2010 and 2050 is likely to be characterized by scarcities: a scarcity of credit, a scarcity of food, a scarcity of energy, a scarcity of water, and a scarcity of mineral resources. While it is important to understand the nature of these scarcities, their causes, and their cures, our main emphasis in this article rests upon what comes after the period of scarcity.
Deciding Our Futures
As the world becomes more complex, the likelihood of making poor decisions about our future increases, as does the cost of bad outcomes. This special section offers insights from futurists on ways that we can come to grips with the flaws in our decision-making processes and improve our strategies for making critical decisions about the future.
1. Decision Making Under Pressure by Stan Shapiro
2. Decision Modeling by The Futures Group International
3. Robust Decision Making: Coping with Uncertainty by Robert J. Lempert, Steven W. Popper, and Steven C. Bankes
4. Managing Your Mind by Michael J. Mauboussin
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