Illuminating the Shadow of the Future:
Scientific Prediction and the Human Condition
September 23 – 25, 2005
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Illuminating the Shadow of the Future:
Scientific Prediction and the Human Condition
Friday, September 23 – Sunday, September 25, 2005
Rackham Building, 4th floor
915 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

This conference was held at the University of Michigan from September 23rd through 25th, 2005. The event was sponsored by the University of Michigan Faculty Research Club and Office of the Dean of Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Global Vision, Inc., with additional support from the Offices of the President of the University of Michigan, of the Provost, and of the Chancellor, University of Michigan-Dearborn. Facilities and logistic support were provided by the Office of the Dean of the Rackham School, University of Michigan.

The keynote speaker was Professor Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University. On the evening of Friday, September 23 he spoke at the Rackham Amphitheater on the topic "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge." On Saturday and Sunday he was joined by 18 other participants having knowledge in various relevant scientific areas.

The underlying interest of the conference was the whole of global societal-environmental forecasting, with particular attention to:

• Shifts in material standard of living (including economic, social, health, and environmental
  well-being)
• Sustainable development
• Change, spread, and altered distribution of war
• Evolving patterns of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass political killings
• Proliferation of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons

One of the key premises on which the meeting was built was that there is a need to seek scientific integration from nominally disparate fields concerning global human society and its relationship to the natural environment; that the time is ripe to see if such an integration can help stimulate a revived development of social science beyond the places where now it is stalled, and the beginning of its integration into modern science.

It was recognized that the long-term goal of high level integration— spanning social, biological, and physical inquiries and methods —is the necessary context within which to adequately approach and explore human society, including the potential of global computational dynamic modeling and forecasting, though starting at the far more modest present state of societal knowledge.

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