We don't live very long, but some of us make up for it by predicting the future. In 1933's The Shape of Things To Come, HG Wells did better than most, correctly predicting a Second World War, but whiffing (so far) on a world plague and worldwide dictatorship. Things To Come, a loose film adaptation, was released three years later.

In 1992, while society blissfully marginalized those few pundits worried about climate change, population growth, peak oil, and fascism, Francis Fukuyama predicted "The End of History" based on the preeminence of free market democracy around the world.

The survival of the free market seems far less inevitable just now, and more people are fashioning their shapes of things to come. Having watched the collapse of his native Soviet Union, Dmitry Orlov populates his collapse scenarios with concrete examples:

(Nassim) Taleb is known for introducing us to black swans (reality-altering observations that invalidate earlier conventional wisdom) but another animal he should be rightly famous for is the Christmas turkey. Taleb says that asking an economist to predict the future is like asking the Christmas turkey what's for dinner on Christmas: based on its entire lifetime of experience, the turkey expects to be fed on Christmas, not to be eaten. As far as the turkey is concerned, Christmas is a black swan-type event.

But yesterday it occurred to me that this analogy extends to all professionals, and certainly to technologists and scientists: when asked about the future of, say, nanotubes, or nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, they will predict that it's bright, and continue to say so until the day their grants are canceled, their salaried positions eliminated, and their labs shut down for political and macroeconomic reasons they are ill-equipped to try to comprehend.

This is precisely what happened during the demise of Soviet science the early 1990s: one moment there was a great scientific establishment boldly predicting a bright future for itself, and the next moment you had experts in holography making little religious holograms to sell at outdoor flea markets in order to buy food, aerospace metallurgists reinventing the straight razor to get a decent shave because disposable razors had disappeared, graduate students dropping their research projects and going off to make some money doing manual labor, and the entire faculty at once trying to find a visiting faculty position abroad.

Writing for the American Conservative, Irish Journo Brian Kaller accepts Peak Oil, but sees Mayberry in our future instead of Mad Max.)

Americans can afford to trim down in many ways. Seventy percent of us are overweight, about a third of our food is thrown away uneaten, and we spend billions transporting food that we could grow a short walk from our houses. Much of our agribusiness energy is spent manufacturing processed foods and their packaging--Wheaties instead of wheat, vegetable soup mix instead of vegetables--that are less efficient and often less healthy. The same goes for other arenas: much of our electrical power is lost in transmission, and much of our heat goes out the window.

When breakdowns do happen, people are often more neighborly than Hollywood imagines. Recent blackouts in St. Louis and New York did not result in mass hysteria but in friends helping each other out. Even the stories about New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina mostly turned out to be urban legends.

(If only that was true.)

If Andy Griffith is too corny, pick your favorite portrayal of a simpler American life. It may not exactly map the future, but it is likely to be more accurate and hopeful than the images we've been given for generations and would be familiar, popular, and attainable.

I wonder about the future, too, but I think change will manifest differently around the world, and that disastrous changes have been happening for some time in the third world. Herbert recounts hideous combinations of raping and maiming in the remnants of the Second Congo War and other parts of Africa are dangerous.

There were more indications last week that the security, economic, and political situation in Nigeria continues to deteriorate. As more than 300 oil industry employees have been kidnapped in the last three years, foreign oil workers must travel by air or in military convoys, adding greatly to costs and reducing efficiency. In an effort to cut costs in 2008 Shell eliminated 1200 oil-worker jobs in the country and is likely to cut more this year. Shell, BP, and Total all suffered losses last quarter and the income of the other international oil companies operating in Nigeria was greatly reduced.

Even Mexico is beginning to be regarded as a failed state, unable to prevail against drug cartels that sell drugs to and buy assault weapons from the US.