I feel that any of the remedies that either are being currently pursued, and/or such that still might be being considered , meant to address the many, with time rapidly increasing environmental and social problems of this planet, do not keep pace with the proliferation of those problems. The only certain thing about our collective, global future is, for an informed person, that whatever problems the world might have had in the past, and is facing presently, the future will have those problems also, but multiplied, and greatly amplified. Although technical and scientific knowledge is increasing astoundingly, the more so are increasing the world's problems. The more computers we have (to put it simplistically), the proportionally more homeless, hungry, abjectly poor, and socially dissatisfied there are in the world; The more natural resources get irrevocably exhausted, and the less water, clean air, plants, and less animals are there left to rejoice in. And also, thanks to our increasing knowledge, and by observing the trend that modern warfare is following, we can, with certainty, expect any future armed conflicts to be very much more devastating than any armed conflicts of the past.

It is only a tiny fraction of humanity who could expect their future to be better than their past, with more choices and less worries. Incidentally, this tiny fraction of humanity is also the portion of humanity that is responsible for the greatest exploitation of resources both - natural (including very many other than human species) and human.

Many people feel a great concern about the state of the world, many people are trying to find a venue for meaningful actions, but despite of a growing awareness of the need to do something to provide a decent future for this world, the prospects are not improving. This, I feel, might be due to the fact that most actions that are being done in order to improve the situation in the world are based on methods, on ways of thinking that we have inherited from our forebears, methods that might be considered adequate by the majority of people, however -  those methods can never result in any significant amelioration of the world's plight, because they mostly have not worked in the past! What I am saying might be going against every grain of the cultural heritage that our ancestors bequeathed to us, it might even sound sacrilegious, but, if we look at the record that our ancestors left behind, we should note that despite teaching the future generations the best they knew, their legacy has been increasingly more problem-some and lethal with every new generation (on the whole). This is undeniable: Warfare gets "improved" with each generation (meaning that weapons can kill more people more effectively), the exploitation of resources gets more sophisticated and escalated, the general quality of life worsens--not measured by any subjective standards, but noting that with each generation there are proportionally more people in prison, more people homeless, hungry, and more refugees. That there is less and less clean potable water and less "natural" nature to enjoy (all this taken over larger spans of time--there were periods of time when things improved somewhat, only to get much worse than before afterwards). All the foregoing statements are well founded in statistics, whereas any optimism about the future happiness of the majority of beings on this planet that there might be anywhere, is not so well founded.

I suggest that perhaps a significant betterment, and also healing of the persistent wrongs, could be obtained if we would stop patterning remedies meant to cure the world's ills on models from the past, and turn instead to an ideal projected into the future. I would suggest that we collectively and globally consciously design an ideal future that would accommodate all life on Earth most optimally. (Please click on: Model Earth)

Consider this: Most of life on Earth is planning for the future, most people do. Those various plans of a multitude of beings entail visions of a place to live, nourishment to be procured, and leisure to be experienced. The trouble is that most of these plans are done by individuals for themselves alone mainly, and that the majority of those plans for future disregards plans for future that others might have. When it comes to realizing of those plans, it is no wonder that all those individual plans for future clash more often than not, and because of that most of the plans for future are not possible to bring into being at all.

What is needed is to synchronize all the plans for future of all the individuals that there might be by making it possible for virtually any person on Earth to input a model that would compare those individual plans for future with each other, match them with all the knowledge we have about the Earth and about human society, and thus create a model of Life on Earth that would be available for inspection and critique by virtually anyone on Earth. Naturally enough, such a model could never be really finished. It would keep dynamically adjusting itself to the ongoing input of all concerned, and to the ever-increasing knowledge of the Earth and human society. The scope of such a model (or rather, a social design tool) could be as large as the Earth, or as small as an individual family. Creating of such a model would be certainly technically possible - the technology for accomplishing of this exists already, and is not complicated - already individual PC's are being harnessed together for a variety of tasks (e.g. "distributed computing"), and their capacity together is often greater than a supercomputer's, but it is not the technology that matters here as much as the principle of approaching the modeling of future.

In contrast to any methods of organizing the world's future known to me, coordinating the designing of the future from the grass-root level by virtually anyone who would be interested in doing so, would have the advantage of not leaving anyone behind; any-, and every-body's future would be designed on valid grounds, taking into account the wishes of all the participants, the availability of resources, and all the knowledge pertinent to which problem, which cannot be said of most processes that to lesser or greater extend, control the creation of our collective future currently. Such a model would put anyone's contemplated future into a right perspective - the model would "teach" any individual what might, and what might not be possible, realistic, and what complications might ensue should such an advice be disregarded. The crises that we are heading into globally is an emergency, and any science contributed towards the construction of this model of the future could be the best instance of an applied science, after all--we need adequate knowledge to face the crisis, - should the knowledge humanity possesses already exist for knowledge sake only? The model could serve as a basis of unifying of all scientific knowledge. Last, but not least - this model of our collective global future would serve as a gigantic "round -able", always in session, ready to advice in any matters concerning anybody's future design, always ready to deal with any emergencies as they arise.

I would like to point out that although there have been many global models already created, all of them (as far as I know) were a creation of just a few people, incorporating only certain aspects of possible futures, and most of these models were limited by partisan interests and purposes. If the energy and all the intentions to improve the state of the world of all the myriad of individuals and organizations that strive to better our collective lot, and indeed of anyone at all, were coherently brought together to co-operate together on a realistic global future on the basis of all available knowledge, creating together a realistic goal to strive towards, this combined energy and knowledge might give our global future a viable hope. As it is today, most future, if it is created at all, is being created by only a few individuals and interest groups that more often than not try to influence the future to their own interest. One of the advantages of the social tool that is described above would be that it could be wholly non-partisan. This social tool would take into account anyone's wellbeing, which as it ought to be, because it is often the non-represented members of any society from whose discontent (caused by non-representation in the future making process) the most violent social changes can arise.

During my graduate years I hope to elaborate and substantiate on all the above. I know that already there exist paradigms and ideologies that might provide epistemological grounds for creating of such a model. It will be left to show that our present barbaric Homo SAPIENS (judged by our own human standards) could yet become a Homo INTELLIGENTES . Else - the possible scenarios based on the trends currently observable could result in realities that no one could really relate to at all. If we really care about our offspring's future, we should make sure that we don't hand them over an Earth that would be less perfect than the one we got from our parents. We should start healing the Earth and sustain our efforts, till the Earth becomes an ideal, most optimal home for all the beings that share her.

ModelEarthProject: <http://gief.pair.com/hearth/modelearth.html>