Possibilities: Imagining a Better Future by J. Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus
John Petersen is a professional futurist who says you can’t predict the future. Instead “what can be accomplished is to create possible or probable scenarios and to account for as many contingencies as possible.”
Petersen’s Arlington Institute helps military and other government institutions and corporations do just that. His book Out of the Blue: Wild Cards and Other Big Future Surprises presents a dizzying array of 84 possibilities of things that could happen in our near and distant future. In creating a database to examine what our future could be like, Petersen ranked the impact any one change in society or our environment might have. He rates the length of time its impact will last and to what degree it is capable of altering the life of the individual, a certain societal sector or society overall.
