. . . a terrorist is running across the landscape with a machine gun. He is running toward the future. A futurologist calculates the terrorist’s trajectory on his computer and finds that it is headed toward the present. Eventually these two paths cross. The terrorist jumps out from the landscape (out of the computer) onto the futurologist’s desk and says, “Unfortunately, I have to shoot you because you stand in the way of the future.” Then he pulls the trigger. The futurologist, if he could still speak, might say, “I reckoned that this might happen.”

We may call the knot just described the “dialectics of freedom.”

This knot can be untangled. There are two knotted perspectives of the future. The terrorist anticipates the penetrability of the future because he perceives it and runs into it, whereas the futurologist is detached because he sits and waits for it to arrive. The futurologist is the more powerful of the two. Because he can be contemptuous of the terrorist, given the improbability that he will get shot, he can also describe precisely the terrorist’s contemptibility. The futurologist can do this because he presupposes the future. The terrorist is merely engaged in it.

The presupposed future is a field of possibilities that surrounds the present. It pulls individual possibilities from the present to become reality. At first glance, it looks like a magnetic field with iron filings. Still, a field theory of the future is impossible. Not because the theoretician can be stabbed to death by an iron filing like the futurologist by the terrorist, as magnetism works similarly, but because future possibilities bend away (become impossible), become bundled, and in the process strengthen or are nullified. They may even run in a direction opposite to the present. Iron filings are incapable of performing such ontological somersaults. The field of possibilities behaves more like a congress of ghosts: some materialize, others make pacts with or conspire against each other, while still others disintegrate.

By supposing that a particular possibility becomes more probable the closer it moves toward the present, the futurologist is able to manipulate the ghosts. Because proximity is measurable, a computer may project the possibilities more precisely as converging, diverging, or crossing curves. The scenario is improved whenever more data are available. The scenario’s degree of probability thus increases, and the margin of error decreases and becomes increasingly measurable. Because we can intervene in this scenario, we can manipulate the supposed future, that is, freedom of choice.

All well and good, but creepy—as is usually the case with ghost stories. The category of closeness (proximity) gives us shivers since it means “close to the present,” that is, “close to me in the here and now.” But I am not all alone in the here and now; others are standing around me, each embedded in their own future. Should I indeed dismiss as improbable everything that concerns others but not me because the future as such is of no concern to me the more distant the possibilities are from my own viewpoint? Because out there they become ever more improbable? We can only accept the category of proximity when we include in it the love of others.

However, a future shared between all others (including myself) has a disadvantage. This grey zone of all individual futures does not possess a horizon. Death has been ruled out. That’s why I cannot recognize myself or anyone else in this grey, increasingly calculable future. The series of scenarios introduced here does not exclude death, that is, it does not forgo self-awareness and appreciation of the other. That’s why it will refrain from precise calculation.

There are further reasons. At issue in the grey future of the futurologist are calculations of probability. A human being, however, is an animal that is nurtured by the improbable. And that’s why the unseasoned soup of the futurologist is unpalatable. The series of scenarios introduced here promises to be flavorful. It will project improbabilities.

Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.

From the perspective of the futurologist, the future is an adventure (advenire, to arrive); that does not hold true for the terrorist—and we should take note of that. The series presented here shares the perspective of the futurologist: it will be adventurous. This promise should make the reader curious. Curiosity motivates all speculation about the future, all presuppositions about the future. The terrorist is not curious, he is engaged. His motives are different, less theoretical.

Curiosity, however, is unreasonable. It tries to jump from today into tomorrow. That is impossible. Wherever you are, that’s where you’ll find today. This series, motivated by curiosity, represents an unreasonable endeavor, it is an invitation to an impossible journey.