# 4 thoughts on “The Futures Cone, use and history”  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joseph Voros]] - Full Title: 4 thoughts on “The Futures Cone, use and history” - Category: #articles - Summary: From time to time people ask about the Futures Cone, and how it came about. Here is a brief history of how I came across it before adapting it to suit my use of the concept, and began using an earl… - URL: https://thevoroscope.com/2017/02/24/the-futures-cone-use-and-history/ ## Highlights -  The 7 types of alternative futures ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h581zgbkpkvd3mmcyg5fyhr2)) - In brief, these categories are: • **Potential** – everything beyond the present moment is a potential future. This comes from the assumption that the future is undetermined and ‘open’ not inevitable or ‘fixed’, which is perhaps *the* foundational axiom of Futures Studies. • **Preposterous** – these are the futures we judge to be ‘ridiculous’, ‘impossible’, or that will ‘never’ happen. I introduced this category because the next category (which used to be the edge of the original form of the cone) did not seem big enough, or able to capture the sometimes-vehement refusal to even entertain them that some people would exhibit to some ideas about the future. This category arises from homage to James Dator and his Second Law of the Future—“any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous” (Dator 2005)—as well as to Arthur C. Clarke and his Second Law—“the only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible” (Clarke 2000, p. 2). Accordingly, the boundary between the Preposterous and the Possible could be reasonably called the ‘Clarke-Dator Boundary’ or perhaps the ‘Clarke-Dator Discontinuity’, since crossing it in the outward direction represents a very important but, for some people, very difficult, movement in prospection thinking. (This is what is represented by the red arrows in the diagram.) • **Possible** – these are those futures that we think ‘might’ happen, based on some future knowledge we do not yet possess, but which we might possess someday (e.g., warp drive). • **Plausible** – those we think ‘could’ happen based on our current understanding of how the world works (physical laws, social processes, etc). • **Probable** – those we think are ‘likely to’ happen, usually based on (in many cases, quantitative) current trends. • **Preferable** – those we think ‘should’ or ‘ought to’ happen: normative value judgements as opposed to the mostly cognitive, above. There is also of course the associated converse class—the ***un****-preferred* futures—a ‘shadow’ form of *anti*-normative futures that we think should *not* happen nor ever be allowed to happen (e.g., global climate change scenarios comes to mind). • **Projected** – the (singular) default, *business as usual*, ‘baseline’, extrapolated ‘continuation of the past through the present’ future. This single future could also be considered as being ‘the most probable’ of the Probable futures. And, • (**Predicted**) – *the* future that someone claims ‘*will*’ happen. I briefly toyed with using this category for a few years quite some time ago now, but I ended up not using it anymore because it tends to cloud the openness to possibilities (or, more usefully, the ‘preposter-abilities’!) that using the full Futures Cone is intended to engender. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h582094v9yv7zk6dqjrejqdq))