Welcome to Week 3 of the Collaborative Foresight course. This week is all about an incredibly simple but powerful technique called two sides to every future. This week you're going to learn what the technique is, and you're going to get to play with it, with a couple of really interesting future topics like neuro sensing technologies and space colonization. This technique is really great because it works at two of those strengths, the future thinking develops. The practical skepticism, which means that you are looking a little bit more closely at ideas for the future and making sure that you're not getting caught up in hype or excitement, and that you're really thinking critically about possibilities. It also builds your empathy, because futures that you might be excited about, someone else may be anxious about. The futures that you're really skeptical about, someone else might have a lot more evidence than you, or a lot more motivation to believe it's possible, and you can develop a more empathetic view as a result of being exposed to that alternative feeling. So this technique, these two sides to every future, it boils down to taking any future idea, any scenario or forecast and responding to it twice. You insist that you have both a positive reaction and also a skeptical or critical reaction. We call this using your positive imagination, and your shadow imagination. Let's tackle a future possibility together, and you can see how this positive and shadow imagination technique plays out. So let's consider the topic of colonizing space or a specifically Mars. This is one of the more far out there futures that I think a lot of people when they hear about it, they think, this is not really something that's going to affect me or my family. Maybe this is going to be something that spans hundreds of years. I'm not going to live on Mars. What do I care about this topic. But space colonization is really interesting for lots of reasons. Just inventing the technologies necessary to get people off of planet Earth and living on another planet, that could have all kinds of ripple effects. These new scientific discoveries. These new manufacturing capabilities that for those of us who stay on Earth that might transform our lives as well. It also opens up possibilities about organizing society in different ways. If you're going to build a new planet and a new society on a planet, people will be thinking about different ways of organizing society and helping humanity flourish. So those are things that we could also do on Earth as well if we decide not to go to Mars. So even though this is a far out fantastical thinking future, it's a good one to consider. So let's think about one of the futures that specifically people are working on. A lot of investors, venture capitalists. Putting money into projects that aim to get the first human settlement on Mars by the year 2028. So a decade by now, Elon Musk has famously said that he would like to personally help a million people get to Mars, to settle on Mars by the early 2030s. So let's hold this future possibility in our mind. This possibility that we would have a million people on Mars in just a little over a decade. Now we would practice positive imagination and shadow imagination on this possibility. For positive imagination, you're simply answering the question, what's something, anything at all that excites you about this scenario? One thing that triggers a feeling of optimism or hope, or maybe just curiosity that you think something good could happen, if this future were to pass. So maybe think about colonizing Mars for a moment. Is there anything about this possibility that makes you feel good that you like about this future. When I ask people about the scenario, here is some of the things that they say leads them to feel a little bit of positive imagination and maybe this resonates with you as well. They talk about new technologies and scientific discoveries. Maybe there would be medical breakthroughs that we could use here on Earth. Or energy renewable, energy breakthroughs that would make it possible for us to live more safely on Earth. People talk about there being a sense of collective purpose for humanity, a new adventure that we can go on together that might unify culture or unify global society in a way that brings people together. Maybe there'll be less conflict or war in this future. People talk about the idea of global collaboration that's set, this type of mission at scale would require countries to work together, and it would provide really practical opportunities for people to join forces in ways that we haven't done before. They talk about the chance to reinvent society, to dream up new forms of government, or new ways of practicing democracy or caring for each other. That gives us permission to imagine things that we haven't taken seriously before. People also say that we might learn things about specifically terraforming or geoengineering. So terraforming is how you change the surface of a planet to be more habitable for humans. Or geoengineering is how you change the atmosphere of a planet to be more sustainable for humans. Even if nobody ever gets to Mars, maybe we will learn some geoengineering and terraforming techniques that re-invent the world into new kinds of beautiful paradises and what might we make our earth if we develop these techniques. So those are some reasons for positive imagination. I mean I've also heard people say they want to be on that mission to Mars. That it would give their life purpose. That they would love to train and be one of those million people. So maybe that is also something that resonates with you. I don't know if I'm personally getting on the shuttle, but some people find that very exciting. After you have really required yourself to look for something that does feel hopeful optimistic about scenario. Now you change directions. Approach it from the opposite point of view. It's time for shadow imagination. What is something, anything at all that worries you about this possible future? What makes you feel uneasy and anxious? What could go wrong? What horrible thing could happen? Again, even if you're wildly optimistic about the future, you think this sounds great, I want this world to be real. You still require yourself to sit with the shadow side and make sure that you're not being naive or blindly optimistic. This is very important to approach from both sides. So what are some things that might worry you about a future in which we're trying to get a million people permanently settled on Mars by the early 2030s? Take a moment, sit with it, let your shadow imagination dig in, and see if there's something that you would be concerned about in this future. Here are some things that people have shared with me when I have shared the scenario with them. One concern is that people with resources might invest in Mars instead of earth, and climate change in particular won't be addressed if people think that we can just leave this planet. That we won't invest enough resources or take urgent enough action to prevent climate change on earth. That it's a distraction in that way. People are concerned about global conflict. So colonizing Mars. Could this lead to Space Wars? Looking at international space treaties, will people bring weapons into space? Will there be fights over who has access to the resources? The assets that are generated. Who controls the territory? Instead of collaboration at unprecedented scale, maybe we have conflict in unprecedented scale. New diseases that we don't know about yet. What if there are microbes on Mars that we bring back to earth and it kills everybody? That's an actual problem that medical researchers are thinking about. It's a realistic possibility. If only one million people get to move to Mars, what about the other seven billion people? Does this create a dramatic new inequality, especially if earth becomes the old land and all of the resources are invested in making Mars the place to live? At a personal level, what if my kids move to Mars and I'm stuck here? That's the anxiety I go to. My kids are only four years old now but they're very adventurous. I could just see them coming home someday and say, "Mom, dad, we're moving to Mars, see you." I just don't know how Skype or Google Hangout will work at a space level. So that could be a bummer. Here's another response that I've gotten. What if Mars is used as a prison colony or forced resettlement? What if refugees are sent there on an involuntary basis? What if we don't have a million volunteers? Who will do the labor? What if it's really hard to colonize the planet? Will there be a forced labor situation? So how will we decide who's going to do that work and what are the risks of it being an involuntary resettlement? So bring some shadow imagination to the question. If you've never thought about this future seriously before, hopefully even just this quick exercise of using both positive and shadow imagination, it unfolds the flower of this future a little bit, so you can see different aspects of it. Peel back the layers and start to see, what makes some people excited about this and what makes some people anxious about it. Wherever your landing, you can start to see the bigger picture. In the next video, we're going to take a look at some signals and drivers, and a really well thought out future scenario that we will be able to use positive and shadow imagination to explore at a more advanced level. Because once you start using positive and shadow imagination, you can really generate a more advanced technique for practicing it. So we will see you in the next video for Advanced Positive in Shadow Imagination.
