CHANGING WORLD VIEWED THROUGH A METHOD OF SCENARIOS

Scenarios can play a powerful role in helping society anticipate and hence be more prepared for possible changes. The future comes out from a careful analysis of the nowdays situation. The future becomes a projection of the presence in this sense. Although both methods of historicism and scenarios construct a future, there is a difference between them: the former analyses past trends searching for the general historical patterns, the latter studies what is happening just now. Both methods are based on the idea of the continuity of time and for both Poppers´ statement about the impossibility to know the future course of history when that course depends in part on the future growth of scientific knowledge which is unknowable in advance are true. In this paper I review several selected scenarios making their analysis through the time. I suppose that the scenarios containing fundamental facts about the presence does reveal a useful perception of the contemporary course of events. Studying scenarios as an important instrument of thinking about the future through a certain temporal horizon shows revolutionary or evolutionary breakthroughs: in a case of revolutionary breakthroughs there must be a very radical turnaround situation concerning the thinking about the future, in a case of evolutionary breakthroughs the future scheme didn´t change, the solution on the actual problems hasn´t been found yet. It will be a case if the scenarios copy more or less one another.