Other's Visions
Tales of Future Past by David H. Szondy is one of the best sources on past visions of what the future will be like. Unlike other sites which make the future a bore, this site is a real joy to navigate. Perhaps more significantly, unlike many sources listed below, most of these visions were the product of relatively unconstrained individual thinking.
Some Individual Visions
Orion's Arm is a collective worldbuilding effort by many individuals. It has as its goal to create a dramatic far-future universe that is internally consistent and abides as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences.
Michio Kaku in the Physics of the Impossible, examines invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future.
Nick Bostrom is an Oxford professor who thinks a lot about the future of humanity and heads an institute dedicated to its study. Four Ideas is a contemporary blog created by a Canadian architect setting forth and illustrating his future visions.
Even the experts can get it wrong. Here are some future predictions that missed the mark.
More or Less Institutional Thinking
The Long Now Foundation was established to develop the Clock and Library projects (a 10,000 year clock is to be built into a Nevada mountain), as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
One of the oldest organizations dedicated to the study of the future is the World Future Society. Here is its annual Top Ten Forecasts for the next 25 years. Foundation For the Future is dedicated to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning the long-term future of humanity by bringing together leading thinkers from multiple disciplines. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent nonprofit research group based in California's Silicon Valley "committed to building the future by understanding it deeply."
The World Resources Institute's mission is to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth's environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations. It carries out this mission through the provision of objective information and practical proposals for policy and institutional change.
The Worldwatch Institute sees itself as a source of information on environmental, social, and economic trends and ideas needed to foster an environmentally sustainable and socially just world.
The Hudson Institute calls itself a non-partisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom. It is a future-oriented, conservative organization founded by Herman Kahn in 1961.
