Starting with some books about our future: Jared Diamond's "Collapse", Lester R. Brown's "Plan B 2.0", and Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near", let's consider where we are going.
Diamond and Brown point to the many cases of collapsing societies, both in history and the present, and the few instances of societies that corrected course in time to recover, survive, and flourish. The failures in history are well known - Easter Island, the Mayan classic period, the desertification of Mediterranean and Mesopotamian societies, the Greenland Viking collapse. Iceland is one of the more successful recoveries from near death.
Kurzweil points to the exponential advance of science and technology. He asserts that the extent of technical progress of the twentieth century will be matched again by 2014 and then again by 2021. At that rate of acceleration the year 2028 will see extraordinary events beyond which no one can predict, a sort of technical/cultural event horizon, thus the term "Singularity". He never mentions the factors likely to derail that curve, of which the two most prominent are ecosystem collapses and the cultural rejection of scientific pursuits by a neo-fundamentalist wave.
It appears that we need better information on the likely futures we are creating. Many modern societies are charging toward ruin today: much of Sub-Saharan Africa, North West China, the American West, Central Russia, North Korea, Haiti, Myanmar (Burma), Yemen, Somalia, Madagascar, ...
On the other hand, some societies could still turn around. The U.S., Russia, and China* could do so. Why don't they?
These societies do not seem to see the consequences of their choices.
If these consequences were better understood, would people choose better options? If so, how could our future probabilities be better illustrated?
Let's say our mission is to make the future consequences
of present actions more visible and comprehensible, so we can act
more rationally with respect to them.
The medium proposed here is a Future-oriented Geographic Information System (FGIS) that can display future scenarios based on present inputs . It would be an overlay on a Google-Earth-type interface to satellite imagery. It would dynamically respond to user-controlled inputs, and it should display a sequence of data for 100 years ahead. It would also be useful to show the same data for 100 years past. A time-resolution of five years would be sufficient, so 20 steps ahead and 20 steps back. Let's call this a "Dashboard for Spaceship Earth".
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