Deep Futures: Our Prospects for Survival

Rating:
Summary: What will become of us?
Review: What will become of humanity and its successors this century, over the current millennium and in the distant future (say 100,000 years or so)? Are we headed for extinction or is 'quality survival' possible or even likely? Are the prospects for quality survival something that we can influence and, if so, what are the priority issues on which to maintain a continuing focus in order to optimize our prospects?

Doug Cocks engages with these questions with obvious enthusiasm. His exploration is immensely wide-ranging and he brings together an extraordinary range of fact, theory and speculation in a way that is scholarly while remaining colloquial, and which carries the reader on a truly fascinating journey through - to quote one of the author's allegories - a series of dungeons in which Posterity finds herself having to slay a series of dragons, maturing and growing stronger as she succeeds in overcoming each more formidable dragon. Cocks' conclusions, at least about the possibility of long term quality survival, are modestly optimistic.

He uses a methodology that contains elements of scenario building and preferred futuring to explore these questions, basing his enquiry around four priority issues. The issues are:
• Nursing the world through endless change
• Raising the quality of social learning
• Confronting near-future threats and challenges
• Anticipating deep-future challenges.

These issues are selected as representative of the need to respond "collectively and selectively to an ever-changing set of priority issues, meaning those judged at the time to have a particular bearing on whether the lineage can achieve quality survival."

Both the content and the methodology will be of interest to anyone concerned with forward planning, as well as to the general reader.

Anyone interested in the long- and shorter- term future of humanity will find this book a fascinating and extraordinarily rich source of material and ideas. It is a tour de force to have been able to assemble and make sense of so much information while maintaining a simple, undogmatic and eminently readable narrative. If you want material on which to base conversation, speculation or analysis about our future, look no further!