Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.
— Jamais Cascio
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal - it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political - but it's insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?
Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.
Trying to do what your competitors are doing but basically a little bit better is probably not going to be the winning strategy. The problem is finding what your competitors wouldn't even consider doing.
Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.
The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.
Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.
Entrepreneurs need to recognize that, especially in the digital domain, they are unlikely to come up with something that is going to be permanently on top, that impermanence and ephemerality is the nature of the beast.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
The reality is that de-carbonisation is not happening fast enough.
In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios.
Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started building them knew they wouldn't be finished until their grandson was born.
