Can We Study the Future?

I was talking to a friend the other day, and the question of progress came up.

The conversion went on: '.... It looks as though change - in technology, social structure, standards of living, life span, life opportunities, etc, etc - within our life time has only become discernible within our life time.....'

Only, her retort was unsympathetic: 'I don't know how that works? As, even though we can see things are changing and even improving right now, no one can know the future, let alone study it. Hell, no one can know where all this change is heading....'

I said, we can 'project' in a great many instance, many kind of futures.

'No, no!' she screeched!

So I simply asked her whether the 'Sun' would come up over the Horizon in the morning.

She replied 'Yes, silly.'

'Well that's in the future,' I said.

Point is, there are a great many things about the future that are highly predictable or forecastable (although some much less so).

But further, there are methods, tools and techniques that can help us see over the Horizon.

Structured ways of thinking and analysing that dramatically increase our understanding of the future.

Below is list of links to ‘wiki-sites’ that give a 101 intro to studying the future!

• Futurology
• Initial Conditions
• Technological Forecasting
• Morphological Analysis
• Trend Analysis
• Systems Engineering
• Social Networking
• Futures Wheel
• FMEA
• Futures Workshop
• Futures techniques
• Backcasting
• Media Scanning
• Future History
• Scenario Analysis
• Environmental Scanning
• Causal Layered Analysis
• Systems Thinking