By Alexandra Whittington and Teresa Inés Cruz

Futurist Alvin Toffler famously said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” It is time for the foresight community to take Toffler’s sage advice, starting with one basic assumption of the Western futurist perspective that dates back to the Victorians: progress.

The concepts of learning, unlearning, and relearning belong in every futurist’s repertoire in the sense that we need to learn our bias for progress, unlearn its primacy as a societal objective, and relearn that the human condition is best served by achieving homeostasis–steady equilibrium. Homeostasis can be relearned because it’s inherent to worldviews within many indigenous and ancient societies, including the Law of Origin, which instructs people that living in balance with nature must be the driving force behind our decisions.

For Indigenous peoples in the Andean-Amazonian region in South America, living according to the principles of “Buen Vivir” translated as “good living,” is a worldview and an ancestral foundation based on living in harmony. Similar to the concept of Ubuntu, “I am, because you are” from South Africa, Buen Vivir places critical importance on collective wellbeing and living in harmony with the wider community, Nature, non-humans, ancestors and cosmological networks.

According to Eduardo Gudynas, Uruguayan Director and Senior researcher at the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES), “Buen Vivir is a new paradigm of social and ecological commons — one that is community-centric, ecologically balanced and culturally sensitive. It’s a vision and a platform for thinking and practicing alternative futures based on a “bio-civilization.”

“Terranascient” coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht captures the essence of this new paradigm. Terranascient refers to the ‘life-affirming’ emotions that are inherent in being caretakers of the planet. Emotions including “an ethic of love, care and responsibility” as described by Albrecht. The philosophy of terranascient has inspired us to consider a new vision for the field of Futures Studies & Foresight.

Re-imagining Futures Studies & Foresight

Today on World Future Day, we propose a new approach to learning, unlearning, and relearning for practitioners of Futures Studies & Foresight. We could be called to integrate with what author Terry Patten calls “intimate” holistic activism, in our relationships and conversations.

As we move towards a precipice of life destroying planetary and human limitations, we are proposing a shift in our approach to creating future scenarios by transitioning from dominant colonized structures of process and output and turn towards an awakened sense where we imagine new possibilities for our future ancestors and engage in nature-based and Indigenous sensemaking.

Dr. Laura Harjo, Mvskoke scholar and author of Spiral to the Stars — Mvskoke Tools for Futurity, describes Indigenous futurity as a return to our true nature and “thinking forward of how to produce knowledge for future relatives.”

Our western ways of knowing focus on an us-versus-them approach that follows logical processes, frameworks, and methodologies with a linear outcome whereas Indigenous and ancestral cultures are non-linear, intuitive, sensorial, reciprocal and actively explore ‘unactivated possibilities’ for future ancestors. Developing new ways of knowing and being will require entering a new cycle of humanity where the most important challenges that lay before us are not just technical, socio-economic, environmental, and political, but human challenges that will inspire us to reframe a new human narrative.

There are three themes that stand out in terms of the need for a new perspective in futures studies and foresight that shift away from the dominant futuristic sci-fi scenarios with visions of colonizing Mars and moving towards co-generating ways to regenerate and revitalize our planet for our future ancestors.

Sustainability & Re-generativity

The first theme is sustainability and re-generativity. Having reached several thresholds for ecological stability, we are at a “do or die” juncture in terms of sustaining life on earth. This is a clear red flag that the dominant model of conducting foresight will not suffice in building new worlds that “embody deeper and more dynamic interactions, relationships, friendships, families, organizations, communities, alliances, and collectives of all kinds. Our species is learning new, important lessons about our responsibility to come together to care for our human future, even as evolution presents us with new survival challenges.” (Patten, Terry. A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries, Berkeley, North Atlantic Books.)

According to the United Nations Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the world’s population but protect 80% of global biodiversity. They are guardians and knowledge keepers and play a key role in safeguarding territories and showing us the importance of not being citizens but as caretakers of a social fabric, a type of “deep ancient coding that connects us to the past, to our ancestors, and to everything we share the planet with” as described by Robert Macfarlane, British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College who is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language.

“Many people today lack an understanding of our reliance on Earth, its vast biodiversity and ingenious, brilliantly designed systems that have evolved over millions of years to support life. We have a lot to learn from those who do understand the symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth. We can’t protect the planet without the traditional knowledge and sustainable agriculture practices of Indigenous peoples living in these areas,” says Justin Winters, executive director of One Earth, a philanthropic climate change initiative.

Indigenous peoples encompass a respect and responsibility for the biological wholeness of the Earth and all its species. As beautifully stated in the book The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change by Gleb Raygorodetsky, “Their worldviews, values, cultures, and cosmology are intricately linked with the ways they relate to the environment, and with their past, present, and future, the living and the nonliving, and the sight and unseen.”

Diversity and Inclusion

The second theme is diversity and inclusion. Futurism has promoted primarily white, male voices for nearly a century and has become a self-limiting element in the world of foresight that quashes competing visions that challenge the status quo. Diversity and Inclusion needs to incorporate not only different knowledge systems including Indigenous worldviews based on collective intelligence, but it also needs to integrate a new range of contributors of different geographies and ages.

In Indigenous cultures, everyone has a place in their community regardless of age and experience and they see themselves first as collective groups of kin, then as individuals. We live in a mostly fragmented society where the young are prized for their youth and more experienced members of the working force are abruptly pushed to the side once society deems that they have reached peak maturity.

In Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul, he describes “The way we find and then occupy our ultimate place is through an ongoing conversation with the world in which we grow gradually clearer about what that place is. One life you can call your own. A life in this sense is your way of being in the world — your place in the world. To be living that larger story is to be a particular character in a web of relationships and meaning, to have a particular place in the story we call the world.”

What if we were to view diversity and inclusion through the lens of human development through the lens of “abilities, knowledge and values” as described by author Bill Plotkin rather than on age, socio-economic status, geography or privilege so common in an egocentric, westernized world?

A Movement of Hope for the Future

The third theme concerns building a movement of hope for the future. The futurists of the world struggle to convey positive and optimistic scenarios that encourage humane action. Too much of the foresight profession is concerned with generating profits at the expense of worldwide mental and biological health. To move past the dark shadows of existential threats such as COVID-19, climate crises, and economic inequality, futurists must embrace an obligation to insist that things can get better.

Instead of living in fear and generating apocalyptic, dark futures can we begin to turn towards futures of living in beauty?

Of seeing the beauty in humanity, in possibilities of creating new ways of knowing and imagining new social, economic, cultural, and human systems.

In the book Active Hope, environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology, Joanna Macy emphasizes that, “Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bringing about what we hope for. Active Hope is a practice. It points us toward a way of life that enriches rather than depletes our world.”

Where do we start, how can we start to shift our mindset, our worldviews?

Over the next few months, we will be diving deeper and building upon the three themes that we are proposing to our fellow Futures Studies & Foresight colleagues and global practitioners. It’s an act of activism, action, and a desire to start a new safe space and exchange dialogue where we can begin to expand our approaches to developing a new approach to Futures Studies & Foresight that is rooted in multiple ways of knowing.

During the next week, begin to ask yourself and consider the following:

• What does it mean to be human? For some it may seem simplistic but at the heart of shifting our mindset we need to understand our individual and collective role in humanity.
• How can you awaken your senses –in ways that diverge from your dominant ways of knowing, being, and seeing?

We leave you with a little nourishment for the mind and soul:

“When was the last time you heard the dawn chorus? I don’t mean when was the last time you happened to be awake after leaving a window open. I mean when was the last time you deliberately woke up before dawn sometimes between February and early June and went outside just before sunrise, simply to listen.”

– From What is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, Rob Hopkins

Connect with us next month as we dive deeper into Theme 1:

Sustainability & Re-generativity

Until next time, take care of one another.

About Us

Alexandra Whittington is an educator, writer, and researcher who has earned recognition as one of the world’s top women futurists (Forbes). She is a lecturer at the University of Houston, where her students describe her as “passionate” about the future. Her courses explore the impact of technology on society and the future of human ecosystems. She has published dozens of articles exploring diverse aspects of the future, often from a feminist perspective.

Teresa Inés Cruz is a Colombian American researcher, designer, futurist, and social entrepreneur who works at the intersection of Social Innovation, Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Andean-Amazonian), and Deep Ecology. She is the founder of Mama Pacha, a Latin American think tank based in Cartagena, Colombia with global reach. Through her work Teresa champions ecological and societal systemic change through the lens of collective/participatory futures thinking, ancestral belief systems and re-imagining our role with nature-based worldviews.

Design by Teresa Inés Cruz

The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30–31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the global Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge, participants from around the world will create virtual teams that – during a 48-hour period – will use Earth observation data to propose solutions to COVID-19-related challenges ranging from studying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its spread to the impact the disease is having on the Earth system. Registration for this challenge opens in mid-May.

“There’s a tremendous need for our collective ingenuity right now,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “I can’t imagine a more worthy focus than COVID-19 on which to direct the energy and enthusiasm from around the world with the Space Apps Challenge that always generates such amazing solutions.”

The unique capabilities of NASA and its partner space agencies in the areas of science and technology enable them to lend a hand during this global crisis. Since the start of the global outbreak, Earth science specialists from each agency have been exploring ways to use unique Earth observation data to aid understanding of the interplay of the Earth system – on global to local scales – with aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak, including, potentially, our ability to combat it. The hackathon will also examine the human and economic response to the virus.

ESA will contribute data from the Sentinel missions (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-5P) in the context of the European Copernicus program, led by the European Commission, along with data from Third Party contributing Missions, with a focus on assessing the impact on climate change and greenhouse gases, as well as impacts on the economic sector. ESA also is contributing Earth observation experts for the selection of the competition winners and the artificial-intelligence-powered EuroDataCube.

“EuroDatacube will enable the best ideas to be scaled up to a global level,” said Josef Aschbacher, director of Earth Observation Programmes at ESA. “The pandemic crisis has a worldwide impact, therefore international cooperation and sharing of data and expertise with partners like NASA and JAXA seems the most suitable approach.”

JAXA is making Earth observing data available from its satellite missions, including ALOS-2, GOSAT, GOSAT-2, GCOM-C, GCOM-W, and GPM/DPR.
“JAXA welcomes the opportunity to be part of the hackathon,” said JAXA Vice President Terada Koji. “I believe the trilateral cooperation among ESA, NASA and JAXA is important to demonstrate how Earth observation can support global efforts in combating this unprecedented challenge.“
Space Apps is an international hackathon that takes place in cities around the world. Since 2012, teams have engaged with NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. The COVID-19 Challenge will be the program’s first global virtual hackathon. Space Apps 2019 included more than 29,000 participants at 225 events in 71 countries, developing more than 2,000 hackathon solutions over the course of one weekend.

Many Filipinos participated in this annual hackathon since 2016. Recently, a dengue mapping forecasting system was developed by data scientists from CirroLytix using satellite and climate data with the goal of addressing the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. This web application, called Project AEDES won globally for the best use of data. “Earth observation data has the potential to be used in fighting epidemics and outbreaks threatening humanity nowadays, as well as to analyze its socio-economic impact,” according to software developer Michael Lance M. Domagas, who led the Philippine hackathon in collaboration with De La Salle University, PLDT, Department of Science and Technology, United Nations Development Programme, and the U.S. embassy. The very first Philippine winner used citizen science and environmental data to develop a smartphone application informing fishermen the right time to catch fish. ISDApp is currently being incubated at Animo Labs.

Space Apps is a NASA-led initiative organized globally in collaboration with Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub and SecondMuse. The next annual Space Apps Challenge is scheduled for October 2–4.

Registration opens May 12. https://covid19.spaceappschallenge.org/

For one thing, it suggests that the planets line up for photos on the same solar ray, just like baby ducks in a row. That’s a pretty rare occurrence—perhaps once in several billion years. In fact, Pluto doesn’t even orbit on the same plane as the planets. Its orbit is tilted 17 degrees. So, forget it lining up with anything, except on rare occasions, when it crosses the equatorial plane. On that day, you might get it to line up with one or two planets.

But what about scale? Space is so vast. Perhaps our solar system looks like this ↓

No such luck! Stars and planets do not fill a significant volume of the void. They are lonely specs in the great enveloping cosmic dark.* Space is mostly filled with—well—space! Lots and lots of it. In fact, if Pluto and our own moon were represented by just a single pixel on your computer screen, you wouldn’t see anything around it. Even if you daisy chain a few hundred computer screens, you will not discern the outer planets. They are just too far away.

Josh Worth has created an interactive map of our solar system. For convenience, it also assumes that planets are lined up like ducks. But the relative sizes and distance between planets are accurate. Prepare to change your view of the cosmos…

1/7 the way to Pluto. I enlarged Jupiter’s moons. On a full-screen view, they are barely visible.

Just swipe your finger from the right edge of the screen to move away from the sun. Despite a fascinating experience (and many cute, provocative Easter eggs hidden between the planets), few readers swipe all the way out to Pluto and the author credits. On my high-resolution monitor, it requires more than a thousand swipes. Imagine if the Moon had been more than 1 pixel…It would take a long, long time! I would rather go out to dinner and a movie. But I urge you to travel at least to Jupiter. At 1/7 of the trip to Pluto, it should take less than 5 minutes.

On this scale, you won’t see the 1½ or 2 million asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. They aren’t large enough to merit a pixel. As Josh states, “Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space.” (an Easter egg at 1.12 billion km on the map).

* I borrowed this phrase from my former Cornell professor, Carl Sagan. He uses it in Pale Blue Dot [timestamp 2:14.]. This video tribute became a touchstone in my life; even more than having Sagan as a professor and mentor.

If you view it, be sure to also view Consider Again, Sagan’s follow-up in the video below. It is a thought-provoking observation of human-chauvinism throughout history—even among ancient Greeks. Carl isn’t the first atheist, of course. But he is eloquent in describing mankind’s ego trip: The delusion of a privileged place in the universe, or the religious depiction of God and his relationship with our species.

Related:

• Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, a most impactful short video
• Consider Again the Pale Blue Dot, the arrogance of man throughout history
• Scale of the Universe: Powers of 10 (Charles & Ray Eames)
• Learn more about Charles and Ray Eames at Snore & Guzzle
• Our Universe is Finely Tuned for Life—Why?

Credit:   Josh Worth and Sachin Gadhave who offers an illustrative answer at Quora.com

^{Philip Raymond co-chairs Crypsa & Bitcoin Event, columnist & board member at Lifeboat, editor
at WildDuck and will deliver the keynote address at Digital Currency Summit in Johannesburg.}

“OS FERMENTATION events have included installations, workshops, prints, and tastings. The installation includes digital prints created by custom electronics and software that allow microbes to take their own “selfies” and add image manipulation effects to their images based on the shifting pH levels, oxygen, and color values of the fermentation process.”

Read more

There is one last mistake in physics that needs to be addressed. This is the baking bread model. To quote from the NASA page,

“The expanding raisin bread model at left illustrates why this proportion law is important. If every portion of the bread expands by the same amount in a given interval of time, then the raisins would recede from each other with exactly a Hubble type expansion law. In a given time interval, a nearby raisin would move relatively little, but a distant raisin would move relatively farther — and the same behavior would be seen from any raisin in the loaf. In other words, the Hubble law is just what one would expect for a homogeneous expanding universe, as predicted by the Big Bang theory. Moreover no raisin, or galaxy, occupies a special place in this universe — unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down.”

Notice the two qualifications the obvious one is “unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down”. The second is that this description is only correct from the perspective of velocity. But there is a problem with this.

Look up in the night sky, and you can see the band of stars called the Milky Way. It helps if you are up in the Rocky Mountains above 7,000 ft. (2,133 m) away from the city lights. Dan Duriscoe produced one of the best pictures of our Milky Way from Death Valley, California that I have seen.

What do you notice?

I saw a very beautiful band of stars rising above the horizon, and one of my friends pointed to it and said “That is the Milky Way”. Wow! We could actually see our own galaxy from within.

Hint. The Earth is half way between the center of the Milky Way and the outer edge.

What do you notice?

We are not at the edge of the Milky Way, we are half way inside it. So “unless you get too close to the edge of the loaf where the analogy breaks down” should not happen. Right?

Wrong. We are only half way in and we see the Milky Way severely constrained to a narrow band of stars. That is if the baking bread model is to be correct we have to be far from the center of the Milky Way. This is not the case.

The Universe is on the order of 10³ to 10⁶ times larger. Using our Milky Way as an example the Universe should look like a large smudge on one side and a small smudge on the other side if we are even half way out. We should see two equally sized smudges if we are at the center of the Universe! And more importantly by the size of the smudges we could calculate our position with respect to the center of the Universe! But the Hubble pictures show us that this is not the case! We do not see directional smudges, but a random and even distribution of galaxies across the sky in any direction we look.

Therefore the baking bread model is an incorrect model of the Universe and necessarily any theoretical model that is dependent on the baking bread structure of the Universe is incorrect.

We know that we are not at the center of the Universe. The Universe is not geocentric. Neither is it heliocentric. The Universe is such that anywhere we are in the Universe, the distribution of galaxies across the sky must be the same.

Einstein (TV series Cosmic Journey, Episode 11, Is the Universe Infinite?) once described an infinite Universe being the surface of a finite sphere. If the Universe was a 4-dimensional surface of a 4-dimensional sphere, then all the galaxies would be expanding away from each other, from any perspective or from any position on this surface. And, more importantly, unlike the baking bread model one could not have a ‘center’ reference point on this surface. That is the Universe would be ‘isoacentric’ and both the velocity property and the center property would hold simultaneously.

Previous post in the Kline Directive series.

Next post in the Kline Directive series.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.