Alvin Toffler got it right… and, as a good futurist, early. He saw the incoming bow wave of what was certain to be a revolution. 
But what he and most prognosticators didn’t—and still don’t—understand is that the shock he identified was just the beginning, an early indicator, a precursor of the most significant, fundamental shift in the history of life on this planet. Sooner than may seem reasonable, that shift will result in the emergence of a new human and a new world.
The nature of the reorganization makes it very hard, indeed, to even comprehend.
Vectors of exponential change from multiple sectors are converging, producing a multilayered, extraordinarily complex and interdependent emerging reality that calls for dramatically different tools and approaches to effectively suss what is headed our way.
Consider these converging forces—any one of which is enough to fundamentally change how humans understand reality, themselves, and how to live on the planet:
Unusual Cosmic Convergence: Our Voyager space probes (and other corroborating science), confirm that our solar system is moving into an unfamiliar area of space that has a significantly different energetic environment than that of all of our recorded history. That different environment is affecting the sun and the other nearby stars in significant ways, causing them to exhibit unfamiliar behavior. These inputs, coupled with the common cycles of the sun, portend significant changes for the Earth. For example, significant climate change has been observed on all of the major planets in our solar system in the recent decade or two.
Potential Solar Flare: The changing energetic environment of our cosmic local cloud seems to have influenced a growing number of stars in our neighborhood to produce massive, previously unseen, solar flares. These flares would have a profound influence on the conditions of all planets in their systems. One report catalogs twenty-six flares on nearby stars in the last two years.
Collapse of Magnetosphere: The Earth’s protective, magnetic field—that shields us from the full effect of the sun’s radiation—is accelerating into a magnetic pole reversal. Sometime in the near future, the field will rapidly collapse and reconfigure itself, with the North and South poles in dramatically different locations. Humans, our planet, and our environment are closely coupled to the magnetosphere. As it changes, our emotions, biology, social interactions, and climate and weather also change.
Rapid Climate Change: The changes on the sun and the magnetospheric reconfiguration, seen in the light of historical patterns and environmental descriptions, suggest that the Earth is on the verge of a rapid change in the climate that will result in what growing scientific studies say will be a lengthy period of significant cold. The early indicators are already being witnessed around the planet (like significant snow in the Sahara desert in 2018). Common assumptions about food production and the availability of energy are likely to be severely threatened.
The End of Manufacturing: The advent of additive (3D) manufacturing is fundamentally changing how things are manufactured, eliminating huge swaths of the traditional sector. Advances, broadly within information technology (which includes 3D printing), are estimated to eliminate upwards of 80 percent of present job categories within the next three decades. No predictions suggest that there will be replacements for most of those jobs.
Doubling or Tripling of Lifetimes: Biological advances appear to be on the verge of dramatically extending the available human lifetime. Researchers are predicting sequential breakthroughs that could result in some present septuagenarians living to 150 or 200. Of course, the effect on the lifespan of younger cohorts would be profound. The questions arise: In the face of rapidly decreasing traditional employment, what is done with all of those additional years? How does society adapt? What does government do to help maintain social stability?
Implications of Artificial Intelligence: It is hard to overestimate the potential for the advent of artificial general intelligence to upend the world that we find familiar. Programmed capabilities that learn, are more capable than humans, and can duplicate themselves millions of times over will launch Homo sapiens off an existential cliff into a brave new world, but of a type that has not yet been described or imagined even by science fiction.
The End of Traditional Jobs: The shifts described above portend the end of work as we have known it. Alternative, meaningful policies and approaches will be required to provide reasonable and productive sustenance for a rapidly aging (but still capable) population in an environment in which conventional notions of employment are disappearing. The concept of being “productive” will have to be decoupled from economic contribution… and/or the definition of value will have to be dramatically broadened to include all of the things that contribute to the quality of life—not just financial impact.
Consciousness Revolution: There is a narrow but growing segment of people, in all parts of the world, who are actively pushing themselves into new areas of consciousness that dramatically threaten the standard scientific explanation of how this reality works. Out-of-body experiences, entheogen-induced alternative states—even the legalization of marijuana—all are indicators of a species that is purposely exploring the edges of consciousness, looking for an expanded space.
Engagement With Extraterrestrial Life: In December of 2017, the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major media ran front-page headlines heralding the disclosure of a previously highly classified defense program that had spent scores of millions of dollars, over at least 15 years, studying hundreds of encounters of our military and “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UFOs. Clearly, there is a growing understanding and awareness of an expanded interaction between our planet and life elsewhere in our universe. Multiple initiatives focused on facilitating an open and ongoing relationship with such life are gaining momentum. If this transpires, everything changes.
Manipulation of Time and Space: The leading edge of alternative science, and indications from whistle-blowers, suggests that we are approaching (if we don’t already have it) the ability to manipulate space and time with certain kinds of technologies. Should those capabilities become generally available within the next decade, the paradigm will shift.
New Energy, Food, Water, Transportation: There are also indications, from reportedly closely held projects, of new capabilities for generating energy without fuel, the ability to cheaply and easily desalinate and purify water, practical anti-gravity functionality, and other exotic breakthroughs. The impending impact of climate change could well spur a revolution in large-scale, sophisticated, indoor food production. Should these see the light of day, it would signal the beginning of a new era.
End of “Truth” and Objective “Reality”: Extraordinary technical advances now make it essentially impossible to know if what you see or hear transmitted over airwaves or the internet is what it seems. Video images can be made to appear to be doing things that were never done, and words can at will be seamlessly put in the mouths of politicians or “targets.” It will be increasingly hard to verify the claims of corporations, governments, lawyers, or plaintiffs, despite the method of transmission of evidence.
The End of Traditional Trust: In December 2017, the Obama administration, with a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, made it legal for the government to lie to the American people. Add that to the demonstrated manipulation of government statistics, product and corporate claims, compromised politicians, special relationships between regulators and regulated groups, religious groups that abuse children, the admitted influence of the CIA with almost all media, and now, with the above-mentioned technological capabilities to show someone doing or saying something that didn’t happen, it is rapidly becoming hard to trust the institutions that have historically provided a modicum of social stability and confidence.
Collapse of Legacy Systems: A compelling case can be made that many key components in the global system supporting human activity are structurally unsustainable and are in the process of imploding. Such major influencers as the Catholic Church are unraveling. The EU has problems around its coherence, leadership, and policy, and serious questions are surfacing about the future of the US political system. The United States reportedly owes $270 trillion that will never be repaid, a debt it may soon be unable to service. Solutions include revaluing the global currency system and upending the world’s financial system.
You get the picture. We are witnessing the collapse of one era and the emergence of another one.
The only way to make sense of this is to consider it from a systems perspective—because it is an extremely complicated, highly dynamical system containing any number of embedded, potential wild-card surprises that could precipitate an unanticipated new paradigm.
There is a principle associated with these kinds of broad-based structural shifts: The world that subsequently emerges makes no sense from the perspective of the preceding one. Regardless of which transitional event is examined—before the internet, before moveable type, before multiple-celled organisms—the existing world does not have either the models or the logic to effectively imagine or picture what will thereafter become the status quo. A world of smartphones visualized from the technological environment of WWI, for example, turns into a Jules Verne-type science fiction story.
We should keep that in mind before we discount, out of hand, some of the possibilities discussed above. Objectively, taking them all together is a pretty compelling argument for constraining our hubris. Something large is happening, and it would be imprudent to presume the impossibility of a particular new world—or new human.
Another corollary of these giant transitions is that in the face of deep, extraordinary change, humans will have really different perspectives and values. They will “see” themselves in very different ways—have different notions of what it is to be human.
So, for example, a new genetic configuration (with new physical and mental capabilities), resulting from human engagement with extraterrestrial life, could result in an evolutionary or “graduation” scenario in which our species becomes much more than the planetary citizens we are now. In such a future, our ideas of physics, religion, social interactions, economy, etc., all change dramatically. It would be a world like something now seen only in science fiction!
Considering what might be in this emerging future, it is important that we take a long—a very long—look backward. There are examples, patterns, visions, and signals that emerge from historical analysis that point to underlying cycles (existing in many different domains) that repeat over varying periods on a regular basis. Analysts like economist Martin Armstrong, who have identified and applied the understanding of these cycles to anticipating the future behavior of areas including financial markets and geopolitics, have amazingly accurate track records.
There are also people like Bruce de Bueno Mesquita, who has developed technology to successfully apply game theory to a degree such that agencies like the CIA retain him to predict upcoming geopolitical—and other—uncertainties. He is said to be over 90 percent accurate in his predictions.
Another out-of-the-box analyst is Clif High, who starts with the assumption that humans are naturally psychic (sound like a latent, new-human capability?), and therefore unwittingly “tune in” to large perturbations from the future. He has developed a sophisticated capability to regularly sweep the web with billions of bots, identifying how indications of these significant future events manifest in changes in how people—in six different languages—start to use new and different words and ideas that point explicitly to the oncoming event.
He had 9/11 six months before the fact. And the Banda Aceh tsunami. And Japan’s Fukushima earthquake. All months before they shook the Earth.
Humanity is developing the tools and capabilities to anticipate and analyze this rapidly emerging world. Not only can we understand (in extraordinary ways) what seems to be happening, but we now are positioned to actively shape the future to assure that it reflects our learnings from the past and hopes for the future.
We have the capability to analyze and understand options… and then consciously engineer the emerging new world to become something that we desire. For the first time in history!
New tools allow mind-boggling pattern recognition and seemingly magical predictive analysis. Extraordinary search and analysis capabilities provide the ability to reach way back, and very deeply, broadly, and quickly. Beautiful and awe-inspiring presentation technologies, coupled with many specific-function “apps,” leverage the ability of the human brain and mind to visualize a particular database through many different lenses—sequentially, in combinations, or all at once!
Scenario development and planning enables the adroit facilitator to use what has been collected to develop a powerful view of the potential on the horizon—one that is robust, comprehensive, and insightful.
My background suggests that with this kind of capability comes a personal and special responsibility to develop a sophisticated, enlightened vision of an extraordinary new world—one that is coming in any case—and establish new thinking, perspectives, and policies to facilitate and make efficient its arrival.
We can start putting in place what needs to be done to shape the elements of the global system such that it begins to point in the desired direction.
No species on this planet has been able to do that in the past… but now, we can.
We should rise to the occasion!
John L. Petersen is the founder and president of The Arlington Institute, a three-decade-old effort to develop sophisticated pictures of potential, multidimensional futures by both developing and using emergent technologies and original thinking. He is particularly interested in approaches for understanding and anticipating the unprecedented transition we are experiencing that will produce a new human and a new world. He hangs his hat at www.arlingtoninstitute.org. He can be reached at johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org.