Several months have past without adding to the emerging future visual. In this post on Visualizing our Emerging Future, I described the origins of the visual and how it is being used. Two specific activities have prompted me to add two new scenarios to the visual:

1. We launched an online course that explores this emerging future, generating great dialog among the participants. This conversation about the future is critical – if we are to shape it versus the other way around.

2. I’ve been asked to present on the future of sports at a charity event on June 13th.

Both activities prompted two additions to the visual. The first – space colonization – came from course dialog. A quick search of Wikipedia gives us the following:

The primary argument calling for space colonization is the long-term survival of human civilization. By developing alternative locations off Earth, the planet’s species, including humans, could live on in the event of natural or man-made disasters on our own planet.

On two occasions, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has argued for space colonization as a means of saving humanity. In 2001, Hawking predicted that the human race would become extinct within the next thousand years, unless colonies could be established in space. In 2006, he stated that humanity faces two options: either we colonize space within the next two hundred years and build residential units on other planets, or we will face the prospect of long-term extinction.

In 2005, then NASA Administrator Michael Griffin identified space colonization as the ultimate goal of current spaceflight programs, saying:

… the goal isn’t just scientific exploration … it’s also about extending the range of human habitat out from Earth into the solar system as we go forward in time … In the long run a single-planet species will not survive … If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets. Now, today the technology is such that this is barely conceivable. We’re in the infancy of it. … I’m talking about that one day, I don’t know when that day is, but there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it. We may well have people living on the Moon. We may have people living on the moons of Jupiter and other planets. We may have people making habitats on asteroids … I know that humans will colonize the solar system and one day go beyond.^[11]

The second addition came from my preparation for this upcoming presentation titled “Reimagining the Future Athlete”. A fascinating scenario that I will dedicate my next post to. This scenario (Sports 2.0) speaks to the wide reaching impacts of the intersections across and among the curves – and the fact that these impacts will be felt across all sectors.

The next iteration of this visual will soon be available via my broad Reimagining the Future presentation.