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A Global Commission on the Future ?
By Dr. Joseph N. Pelton

SUMMARY: Many have suggested new initiatives that would help us create the 21^st century we desire—namely a future that preserves the biosphere, avoids global warming, and expands human education and opportunity. One of the oft-repeated ideas that emerged as the year 2000 arrived is the proposal to create a Commission on the Future (COF). Many countries have national commissions on education, transportation, energy, farm subsidies, and medical ethics and product safety. Why then not have a commission or a foundation that might help us plan for the future?

As we embark on a new millennium in 2001, optimism is in the air. This is not the naïve optimism that pervaded the New York World's Fair of over a half century ago. Back then it was envisioned that technology would solve all problems of housing, transportation, energy, want and crime by the end of the 20th century. No, it is a new and more realistic optimism. We now know that just developing new technology will not solve all of our problems. Longer-term survival and development of the human species needs better economic, social, and technical systems to preserve our biosystem over many millennia into the future. It is absolutely essential that we develop soon (i.e. within the 21^st century) better and integrated planning to solve societal problems on a global scale. In short we seem to be on the verge of a new mindset that says advanced technology needs to be applied more wisely.

Under this new mindset we must view the effective implementation of new technology and systems on a more interdisciplinary basis if we are to make progress in building a sustainable human. The keys to our new hopes for a brighter 21^st century are:

• Improved global education and health care via new electronic infrastructure
• New environmental monitoring systems that let us understand changes in the ocean and ground systems, atmosphere and stratosphere in real time.
• New economic systems that are global, incentive-oriented to reward environmental health, and transcend simple growth of material wealth.
• Development of effective trading and regulatory systems that reward open competitive systems and discourage monopolistic or environmental abuses.

Many have suggested new initiatives that would help us create the 21^st century we desire—namely a future that preserves the biosphere, avoids global warming, and expands human education and opportunity. One of the oft-repeated ideas that emerged as the year 2000 arrived is the proposal to create a Commission on the Future (COF). Many countries have national commissions on education, transportation, energy, farm subsidies, and medical ethics and product safety. Why then not have a commission or a foundation that might help us plan for the future?

Such an "independent commission" would let us know how we are doing. Where are environmental problems, radiation dangers, trends toward desertification, industrial pollution, global warming or health hazards and pandemics on the rise? Where are the most important new educational and health care systems advances occurring? Who has developed systems that allow economic growth and new jobs to expand in concert with global environmental needs? (This past year one "green investment fund" experienced greater than 100% value appreciation).

Certainly none of the proposals that support such a Commission on the Future are seeking to create planned economies or guide the development of technology. We have free-markets, national executives, and legislatures that attempt to do that sort of thing--although not always that well. There are also down sides to trying to attempt such a process through the UN system or through national governments.

No, the idea behind such a private, non-governmental commission would be to help us to identify key trends, highlight emerging problems, expose the "fraying" of planetary environmental systems, and even to help us establish new visions of what might be. We have had prototypes such as the Club of Rome, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, and the Devos, Switzerland world economic conferences. These institutions and initiatives have given us useful insights but have fallen short of the ambitions that proponents of a world Commission on the Future aspire to achieve.

Some of these past initiatives did not succeed for several reasons. Some of these projects were too heavily oriented toward systems analysis. Others were not focused enough on hard data collection and were biased in favor of reporting what they would like to see happen rather than a tough-minded report of what is actually happening. Perhaps most importantly these activities did not use sufficiently interdisciplinary techniques (by being focused on just technology, or just economics or just environment) to produce important results. There is mounting evidence that we have true macro-problems that involve complex and interrelated systems. These include challenges like global warning, overpopulation, de-forestation, genetic damage due to ozone loss, and wholesale loss of species. These problems and more suggest that better planning may not be desirable but absolutely essential to human survival.

If such a commission were to be established there are a number of practical questions that would need to be answered first. Would it be global in scope? What would it do? Who would serve on such a commission, for how long, and how would they be selected? How would it be funded? Would it be merely advisory or would it have responsibilities? Whom would it advise and how? These practicalities will need to be answered by others such as national legislatures, heads of state, and major international institutions if such a Commission on the Future is actually established.

Nevertheless, some useful proposals can be considered for the sake of preliminary discussion. It would probably be best for the Commission on the Future (COF) to be an internally endowed commission that would work on a global scale and operate like a private non-governmental organization like the Red Cross/Red Crescent or CARE International. This commission would be informally "empowered" to make an annual video report to the world via CNN, NHK, BBC, UTN, FR3, TV Globo, Televisa, etc. This report would of course also be as published on the Internet and in printed document form as well. It is because this report could directly reach more than 200 million people directly via Internet that gives this initiative its greatest power and hope for maximum impact. This report would help us to understand some key facts and trends. It would report what has happened over the last five to ten years rather than just speculate on what will be.

These annual COF Reports might actually show us remarkable developments. It would document how information (especially scientific and engineering information) is expanding 200,000 times faster than our global population. It could show us some alarming trends. It would indicate that the world's population reached the billion mark around 1805, hit six billion in 1999, and that it will likely reach 10 billion or more by 2075. It might help us to understand that more people are to be educated in the next 40 years than have ever been educated since the start of human civilization. It might provide us key parameters about changes to the biosphere (i.e. methane and carbon dioxide increase). It could announce awards for the most important new developments to assist the survival of the species (sort of an Oscar award for "Future Vision" and the "Most Human Friendly Technology").

This Global COF could also report on changes around the world that effect our current and future lives such in areas as varied as environmental gains and losses, telecommuting, developments in patents and inventions, conflicts and negotiated settlements. It could also give us "vision reports" of where we might be in another century or two and highlight key barriers or problems that might prevent our achieving new goals. In this regard it could contrast and compare various national "vision reports" as developed by the national governments and UN agencies around the world to see where public policy is converging or diverging.

It hopefully could do so without being bound by the politics of the United Nations or individual nations. Different units would collect historical trend information than those that projected future trends. Different entities and scholars from around the world would ensure that broad perspectives and interdisciplinary teams of researchers were included in the process.

The aerospace, information, and telecommunications industries around the world should welcome a truly independent and objective Commission of the Future that would allow everyone around the world to understand the promise and pitfalls that stand on the horizon of the next century. The Greeks had their Delphi oracle and the societies of the East have had their seers. Is it not time for us to create new tools to help us move more wisely into the future? Surely it is time that we create new global mechanisms that can help us chart (independently and objectively) a new human path to the future.

Ultimately our quest will be to travel beyond the confines of Earth's gravity to distant planets and ultimately the stars. Could an independent and global Commission on the Future help us to achieve our destiny more wisely and more safely? Now is a good time for serious discussion to begin about a more effective "future forward" strategy. What do others in the industry think about better and more objective mechanisms to think about the future of technology and its application to human needs?

One way to start would be to allow us to draw our "living treasurers" such as Arthur C. Clarke, Hugues de Jouvenal, Professor Tapio Varis of the University of Tampere , Professor Jiro Kondo of the University of Tokyo, Clement Bezold of the Institute for Alternative Futures, Professor Marvin Minsky of the MIT, Edward Cornish of the World Future Society, and an interdisciplinary panel of Nobel Laureates that could help us define the first round effort for a "futures research agenda." Another more immediate step would be for the Earth/Space Review, the World Future Society, and/or the new Sir Arthur Clarke Institute for Telecommunications and Information (CITI) to create a web site that would provide further information and allow detailed debate on this important issue--survival of the species.

It is absolutely essential to find a way to create a sustainable biosphere for humans on planet earth in the 21^st century, because the alternative is unthinkable—the end of human society. The optimism that we see as we begin a heroic new millennium is tangible and contains its own power. We should seize that power and that potential to create a new global process that can allow us achieve that important end.

About the Author
Dr. Joseph N. Pelton is the Executive Director, Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Telecommunications and Information (CITI), and Deputy Director of the Institute for Applied Space Research at George Washington University.