We will only note two similarities...

We will only note two similarities: although the socialist state redistribution society promoted planned research and programming while the futures research institutes were state-funded, the collapse was not foreseen; the similarity with the “mishap” of the futures research institutes in the West, who did not foresee the first major oil crisis (1973-74), nor the “domino effect” in 1989 is striking.

Despite of the uncertainty of futures researches one may affirm the certainty of the need to revive and deepen futures researches world-wide , at least in the following aspects: evidence of local-global connections and balancing the forces of globalization and localization; the transition to a new post-industrial civilisation and its implications; the law and ethical aspects of the new, astonishing evolution of the science, especially of genetics and bioengineering; the centralization and decentralization of connections, as well as those of diversification and standardization that appear in the context of the technology revolution in IT and communications; connections poverty-wealth; natural-artificial and so forth.

Such new set of problems - much vaster than the aspects mentioned above - is now felt as a profanely inspired millennarism that impregnates the spirituality of the second millennium’s end in a different fashion than the religious millennarism that dominated the end of the first millennium. The profane millennarism as a dimension of today’s spirituality claims to observe humankind at its essential turn-points.

This millennarist pulsation responds to an intellectual and also an “existentialist” need and it expresses a truth. Such established, felt or fathomed truth draws attention on the fact that we participate in an ample mutation at the end of which things will never again be exactly as they used to be. And how will they be? The possible answers should be approximated through new futures studies, which will be different from the ones up to 1990.

Who should carry through researching the future of the aspects in the new problems set that, in point of fact, pertain to “palpating”, grasping, diagnosing the essence of the unfolding new civilization at the passage from the “old” into the “new” millennium? The question is less naive than it seems. It deliberately ignores the political and economic bodies having precise interests.