2. Bright prospects for the long-term future. From the long-term perspective, is this civilization evolving in a positive direction, barely holding its own, gradually deteriorating, or heading for a catastrophe? Are the present actions of the civilization moving it in a direction that is generally positive and appropriate, or generally harmful and negative? Has it identified and counteracted all future catastrophes that might eliminate its culture or cause it to regress enormously? In short, are its prospects for the long-term future bright or bleak?
3. Profound knowledge of the world. How accurate, profound, and advanced is this civilization’s storehouse of knowledge? Its storehouse includes its accumulated insight, understanding, and wisdom regarding its own species and culture, its total environment, cosmic evolution, intelligent life in the universe, and all other aspects of the universe. A successful storehouse includes profound accurate knowledge about the most fundamental big-picture questions of all, about any transcendent and spiritual dimensions that actually exist, about any religious and psychic phenomena that actually exist, and about any other genuine sources of awe, reverence, meaning, and purpose. Virtually all effective ways of gaining accurate knowledge and deep wisdom are accepted.
How well does this civilization protect its storehouse of knowledge from the worst imaginable catastrophes? Even if that civilization dies out, the remains of its culture and knowledge might eventually be discovered by a few survivors or by some other intelligent species that develops later on that planet. Or it might be discovered by some other civilization through spacecraft or automated probes. They might then preserve this knowledge in their equivalent of museums and archives–and add it to the galactic storehouse of knowledge.
4. Mutually beneficial interaction with other civilizations in the galaxy. How extensive and advanced is this civilization’s interaction with other civilizations in the galaxy? At one end of the scale would be a civilization that has no interest in other life in the universe; they perceive themselves as isolated and alone. Somewhere in the middle of the scale would be a society that feels connected to life in the universe, and gains some of their meaning and purpose from this collective self-image and from their vigorous efforts to make contact, even though these efforts have not yet been successful. At the top of the scale would be societies that have become full-fledged interactive members of the galactic community, interacting with other civilizations in a manner that is peaceful and cooperative, even altruistic, rather than quarrelsome and pugnacious. Interaction could range all the way from simply exchanging information (by radio, laser, or probes, for instance) right up to mutual assistance, joint projects, tourism, and trade.
How well are you doing?
At any stage in its history, humanity can use these four universal goals or guideposts to assess its current level–its strengths and accomplishments along with its weaknesses and failures.
This report card can also highlight the areas in which your civilization is making progress, and those in which it is declining. It is not particularly useful to ask whether the totality of your culture is demonstrating progress or not, seeking a simple yes or no answer for the whole, without differentiating the four goals. And even within some of the goals, you may see progress in some aspects and deterioration in others. The concept of progress makes much more sense within the four universal goals than it does as a single measure applied to the whole range of achievements and declines.
Here is the method that we have evolved for assessing how well our civilization is progressing on each of the universal goals. We are sending it backwards through time to you as a gift to use if you wish, but we realize you may prefer to adopt some method of your own.
For assessing each universal goal, we use a scale from 1 to 10. A “1″ is the worst possible position that anyone can imagine for human civilization. Such a rating would mean that we had completely failed to achieve this goal, or even make any progress.
At the other end of the scale for each goal, a “10″ is the best possible position that anyone can imagine. Such a rating would mean that humanity had achieved its maximum potential for success at this goal, given the length of its history. A “10″ is the best that we could have achieved if we had made this a central goal for our society some time ago, and if we had then focused our efforts and resources on achieving it. In short, have we achieved this goal at the maximum level that could reasonably be expected of us at this stage in our development? Now, with the two ends of the 10-point scale defined, it can be used to assess humanity at any stage in its development. In particular, you might be interested in thoughtfully rating how well your own society has achieved each of the four goals at your present stage of history. In a moment, to stimulate your thinking, we will tell your our ratings for your era, but before you read these you might want to pause here to rate each of the four goals yourself.
Here is your report card–a summary of our assessments of your era–before we proceed to a more detailed discussion of each one.
* Effective day-to-day functioning: score of 6 (average), but effectiveness has recently been deteriorating.
* Bright prospects for the long-term future: score of 3 (very poor). Your awareness has recently been improving, but the problems and dangers are outstripping your actions!
* Profound knowledge of the world: score of 8 (very good).
* Mutually beneficial interaction with other civilizations in the galaxy: 4 (poor), but your efforts have recently been improving.
So there, in a nutshell, are our four assessments of how well you are doing. Now, in hopes that it will be useful for you, here is our detailed assessment of each goal in turn.
1. Effective day-to-day functioning. Your score is 6 (average). Your effectiveness in managing your day-to-day affairs is a mixture of positive and negative.
On the positive side, much of your short-term functioning is good spirited and intelligent and effective, and you are making excellent progress in several spheres of life on earth. Some good examples are communications, travel, information/learning technology, applied social sciences, practical knowledge of human health, creation of hiking trails and national parks, tolerance of diverse cultures and life styles, and intolerance of cruelty and war. Life for a large number of people is reasonably good: society is organized sufficiently well to enable them to pursue their major goals and projects. Many people demonstrate compassion, helpfulness, and altruism, at least within their local group. Many regions are characterized by peaceful cooperation and effective governance.
At the same time, in other spheres and regions, your day-to-day functioning is dysfunctional, petty, quarrelsome, and violent, with harmful outcomes. You have the capacity to do much better.
Within the short-term day-to-day perspective, your worst follies and weaknesses are violence, warfare, civil unrest and repression, terrorism, serious crimes, occasional or local breakdown of law and order, outmoded governance, environmental degradation, deep-seated selfishness, unwillingness to cooperate and work together harmoniously in order to solve current problems, inadequate food and water for many people, and widespread self-destructive use of drugs (including alcohol and nicotine as well as cocaine, crack, and heroin). Life for a large number of people is miserable or trivially shallow. We feel sad about your poignant failure to improve your handling of day-to-day affairs. Your performance is only barely satisfactory–far from achieving your excellent capacity for successful functioning.
The most worrisome aspect of your day-to-day functioning is its deterioration over time. You should feel pleased and proud about the aspects that have been improving, and simultaneously upset that your day-to-day functioning has been declining overall. Things have become increasingly difficult, disorderly, and ineffective, and are in serious danger of deteriorating much further. Obviously, for the sake of your own children as well as everyone else alive in the future, it is important to reverse this trend as soon as possible. It is natural for the day-to-day effectiveness of civilizations to rise and fall over grand sweeps of time, so do not feel disheartened by your recent downhill slide. If enough people feel strongly committed to reversing that slide, for the sake of future generations, there is no insurmountable obstacle to succeeding.
Perhaps our views on your performance in handling your day-to-day affairs seem rather pessimistic to you. And of course you get a depressing picture of your short-term functioning from your newspapers and news broadcasts. Let us cheer you up a little by pointing out that the effective functioning of your daily life around the world generally overshadows the ineffective, except in a few badly governed or war-torn regions. That is why we rate you as “6″ rather than “2″ or “3.” You have the capacity of achieving a “10″ if you make the effort. So there is no need to feel pessimistic or depressed: cautious hopefulness is a better response to our assessment.
2. Bright prospects for the long-term future. Your score of 3 is very poor. It is your lowest score–clearly your weakest area. You do not take the long-term future into account nearly enough in your public and private decision-making. As a result, your prospects for the next few decades are not very happy. You have very little chance of achieving a future that is dramatically better than the present. Your chances of a negative future are alarmingly high–a matter of grave concern to those of us who are members of the generations after yours. We inherit the outcomes of your choices and neglect.
A few years ago, your futurists contemplated only positive futures and discussed which of these utopian options to choose. Now they have had to lower their aim; instead of a utopia, they now hope that you can simply hold your own instead of slipping backwards. “Holding your own” means that, over the next few decades, you maintain approximately the same net balance of positive and negative, happiness and suffering, improvements and deterioration, helpfulness and cruelty, love and revenge, effectiveness and breakdown, functioning and disruption, peace and warfare.
It is appropriate to strive for a future that is even better than the present; we would be delighted to receive such a wonderful gift from you. But it is also appropriate to strive to hold your own–to retain the good features of the present, halt most of the deteriorating trends, and avoid the worst catastrophes of all. Without such efforts, you run the risk of creating a future beyond your worst nightmares.
Here are some of the particular behaviors that harm and alarm us the most. You continue to invent, manufacture, and stockpile weapons that are capable of severely harming or even ending human civilization. You make littl
This list of books comes from A Message From Future Generations. These are the books that future generations would recommend we read (in order to understand the very long-term perspective) if they were able to speak to us.
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THE TEN MOST USEFUL BOOKS
FOR UNDERSTANDING OUR PERSPECTIVE
(A message to us from future generations)
Emmanuel Agius and Salvino Busuttil (editors). What future for future generations? Papers from one of the stimulating conferences sponsored by the Future Generations Programme, Foundation for International Studies, University of Malta.
Wendell Bell. Foundations of futures studies. A comprehensive guide to studying the future.
Norman Care. On sharing fate. The need to take our needs into account, since you and we share the same fate.
Caring for the earth: A strategy of sustainable living. A total plan of bold action to sustain the planet.
Eric Chaisson. The life era: Cosmic selection and conscious evolution. In the history of the universe, we are now probably entering the era of widespread life and diverse civilizations.
Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers. Beyond the limits: Confronting global collapse; envisioning a sustainable future. Understanding the planet, and moving toward a better relationship with it.
Ernest Partridge (editor). Responsibilities to future generations: Environmental ethics. Several philosophers discuss your relationship with us.
Jonathan Schell. The fate of the earth. A profound and powerful look at the horrors that you may inflict on us.
Thinking about future generations and Creating a new history for future generations. Two collections of wide-ranging essays by some of the best thinkers about future generations. (Kyoto: Institute for the Integrated Study of Future Generations, Future Generations Alliance Foundation.)
Allen Tough. Crucial questions about the future. What is most important, how can you achieve a positive future, and how can you help us? (USA: University Press of America. Other countries: Adamantine Press.)
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Ten additional suggestions for further reading
Alan Durning. How much is enough? The consumer society and the fate of the earth. One of many useful books from the staff of the Worldwatch Institute.
Future generations journal of the global network on responsibilities towards future generations and their environment. Published by the Future Generations Programme at the University of Malta.
Future survey: A monthly abstract of books, articles, and reports concerning forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future. Indispensable. Edited by Michael Marien and published by the World Future Society.
Futures: The journal of forecasting, planning and policy. A forum for some of the most thoughtful writing on the future.
Hans Kung and Karl-Josef Kuschel (editors). A global ethic: The declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Toward a global ethic based on beliefs that are common to all religions.
Martha Rogers. Learning about global futures: An exploration of learning processes and changes in adults. Patterns of the mind, heart, and soul when people face the reality of future generations. (Doctor of Education dissertation at the University of Toronto.)
Richard A. Slaughter. New thinking for the new millennium: The knowledge base of futures studies. This book, plus his subsequent “Knowledge Base of Futures Studies” series, provides a panorama of relevant ideas from around the world.
Allen Tough. “Making a pledge to future generations” (Futures January 1993 and The Futurist May 1993) and “What future generations need from us” (Futures December 1993 and The Futurist March 1995). For the second article, people in nine countries role-played future generations and composed a message.
Warren Wagar. The next three futures: Paradigms of things to come. A bold conceptual framework for organizing the various approaches to the future.
Edith Brown Weiss. In fairness to future generations: International law, common patrimony, and intergenerational equity. A legal approach that takes our needs and rights into account.
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This page, created and maintained by Dr. Allen Tough, is part of a web-based Invitation to ETI. (ETI means any form of alien or extraterrestrial intelligence.) You might also be interested in our other pages. Our home page for humans presents an overview of the entire website. Our Invitation to ETI page issues our invitation, describes our hope for a worldwide dialogue, and lists our questions for ETI. Who we are describes the members of the informal group that has issued the invitation. Another page provides background information About Allen Tough and the invitation An academic paper outlines the rationale for an array of search strategies, with this invitation as one approach. You might be interested in links to further ideas. If contact or some other exciting event occurs, news will be uploaded as soon as possible to the news page and to alternate locations at GeoCities, at Netscape Netcenter, at Angelfire, and at Richard Burke-Ward’s website.
The email address for Allen Tough is WelcomeETI@aol.com. His fax number is 1-416-444-5538 and his telephone is 1-416-444-3135.
Copyright ? 1995 Allen Tough. All rights reserved.
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