Abstract
Historians study the paths that have led from paradise or fearful despair to the present; futurists study the paths that lead from the present to a promised paradise or fearful despair. One profession looks back and learns from past successes and mistakes; the other looks forward to find a route to a desired future. One tries to find truth about what happened and the other conjectures about what may happen and how to improve on a future based on random chance and weak decisions. We have used counterfactual thinking throughout and illustrate some outcomes using point scenarios. We have used present tense in all of our scenarios, so in order to avoid any possibility of confusion between true history of the facts in the issues we discuss, and speculation , we have placed the scenario narratives in italics throughout this book. They are not true.
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Notes
- 1.
The lyrics of a song from the 1971 Broadway show Follies captures the yearning to know what might have been . “You take one road, you try one door, there isn’t time for any more. One’s life consists of either/or. One has regrets, which one forgets, and as the years go on, the road you didn’t take hardly comes to mind,” from the song, “The Road You Didn’t Take” Lyrics by Steven Sondheim, Follies, 1971.
- 2.
It is a remarkable that Bradbury used the unnatural death of butterfly in his 1952 short story. The “Butterfly Effect” was used as a metaphor by Edward Lorenz to help explain Chaos theory in 1972. In non-linear systems, very small disturbances can lead to gigantic changes in the downstream performance of complex systems.
- 3.
This topic was introduced to the futures community by one of the authors of this book (Todorova 2015) in the article Counterfactual Construction of the Future: Building a New Methodology for Forecasting, World Future Review, Sage, 2015.
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Gordon, T.J., Todorova, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Future Studies and Counterfactual Analysis . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18437-7_1
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