http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk A scrapbook of progress, ideas, emerging findings, and developments from the Beyond Current Horizons programme Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:10:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well there we are. The programme of work outlined last year for Beyond Current Horizons is complete. Addressing the questions we started with has been as complex, difficult and stimulating as we guessed it might be, but it's been a hugely valuable exercise — not only as an opportunity to explore ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2009/06/18/248/ We're still editing the draft scenarios, which is stimulating and tricky, like all the best tasks. We'll be talking about them here very soon: in the meantime, here's a tiny injection of the sort of thing we won't be talking about (at least, not right now): Today for lunch we had ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2009/03/19/245/ While we're putting together the scenarios from the last meeting of the BCH Advisory Group, here's a more involved future world: JG Ballard's Drowned World on BBC7 (UK only, available till Sunday). Published in 1962, it's worth attention as a source for another mythic strand to draw on in response ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2009/03/02/243/ Well. That was pretty exhilarating. We've just had the privilege of spending three days in the Cotswolds with our Expert Advisory Group, laying out the structure of the three worlds that form the basis of our BCH scenarios. We'll share more detail about these scenarios in a later post: this ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2009/02/27/239/ Rory Carroll is wearing the robes this week, exhorting us to look to the Mayans for an awful reminder that nothing lasts for ever and that we ignore the signs of imminent doom at our peril: much of the article is a recapitulation of Jared Diamond's argument in Collapse: According to ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/11/24/177/ In Kevin Kelly's piece The Missing Near Future I was struck by this passage: As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/11/21/165/ Not the McKenna version, more a shorthand to describe a new sector of industry. I was reading earlier about Dizzywood, a virtual world for children in which avatars work to repair a damaged landscape through planting trees, cleaning things up, promoting the use of non-polluting activities and presumably all carrying ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/09/22/107/ Back at work, and over breakfast enjoyed this article from John Gray, discussing the inability of the West to recognise that the relationship between it and Russia has changed, and the part played by a particular story in confirming that delusion. The story he has in mind he calls the ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/09/09/100/ Rain, spreading east: hearing James Naughtie say these words as I started my day might be why I'm thinking about the end of the world. But I'm realising, as I send more time thinking about the future, that a more likely reason is that I'm very bad at thinking of ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/08/01/69/ Friday afternoon! Time for a video: H. G. Wells and Alexander Korda's 1936 film Things To Come, based on Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come. It starts in 1940 as a world war starts to unfold, a prediction Wells got wrong by a year: other prescient elements include the ... http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/18/25/