Halcyon Imagines

Imagining understanding our deepest human impulses...

 

...unlikely, perhaps, as even the world's top psychologists struggle with this still.

Imagining the next 100 years...really?

A noted futurist imagines a century during which Japan and Turkey might form an alliance to attack the US, Poland would become America’s closest ally. Mexico would make a bid for global supremacy, and a third world war would take place in space!

Are such forecasts meaningful, however?  A dimly-remembered book from the late 1980s forecast nuclear war between Brazil and Argentina by 2011; temporally, it could still happen, but realistically, it's - hopefully - rather unlikely...

In any case, experts on complexity point out repeatedly that complex systems do not lend themselves to the mechanistic approaches (such as forecasting, cause-and-effect analysis and systems analysis) that work in merely complicated systems.  Confident "back-casting" from even a year's hence therefore seems a rather risky business, but from 100 years? 

Nevertheless, we still need to plan where we can - e.g. to mitigate against the worst effects of climate change.  So what can we forecast and prepare for with confidence at the societal level and what remains in the realm of fantasy?  This seems to be one of the key questions of the age...

Our aim? Introducing ideas that have never met...

From today, our Halcyon Days blog will also include posts of some the thousands of comments and quotes by others that have made us feel and have made us think. 

Many of these quotes are already available on the community pages at Halcyon Future, but we will now also start to share these quotes here in order to encourage others to reflect upon and make use of the ideas - and in many cases, the timeless and profound wisdom - contained within them. 

For now, we will deliberately not comment directly on most of the quotes that we post because, although they stir much in us, we would like to leave it you to interact with the quotes in your own way. We will therefore simply tag the quotes under the same categories that we use for all other entries here, and on both Halcyon Future and Halcyon News (where we share exciting responses to the world's problems). 

You can therefore now easily find news, quotes, blog entries for all of Halcyon's communities under common categories, and we will soon add audio, video, conversations and related content from all over the social web. 

However, we also believe that most value will come not from leaving ideas within their categories - on the contrary, we believe that such silo thinking actually compounds many of the world's problems - but rather, like a chemist or perhaps an alchemist, from introducing to one another ideas that have never met. 

For example, how well can acceptance co-exist with activism, complexity with simplicity, or consumption with sustainability?  Only one way to find out: let's get them together and watch the novelty emerge...