The laws of history are such that predictions of the future are always fraught with uncertainties and problems. Futurology – the science that offers forecasts of the future – builds its conclusions mainly by transferring to it the trends of development existing in the present. What are these trends?
Most modern scholars believe that the modern era has a dual character. It represents the final phase of a gigantic “megacycle” of human history and, at the same time, the initial stage of the emergence of a fundamentally new stage of evolution.
On the one hand, a number of countries are still subject to the trends of isolationism, cultural insularity, technical and economic stagnation, totalitarianism and hostility to the outside world that have persisted since past times. Mankind still retains the inertia of its past bifurcation into “East” and “West”.
On the other hand, the process of formation of a fundamentally new type of social reality is unfolding. This process is going on simultaneously in two main directions: 1) the formation of a new type of society in the most developed countries; 2) the formation of a global social organism covering the whole world (globalization).
The new type of society replacing the industrial one is called in different ways: “post-industrial society”, “super-industrial civilization”, “information society”, “technotronic society”, etc. There is an opinion that such a society has already developed by the beginning of the 21st century in the most highly developed countries, while other countries will need another 25-50 years for this purpose.
The transition from industrial society to post-industrial society is not a smooth process. It has its own difficulties and contradictions, and such contradictions that the mankind of the past epochs did not know. These are, first of all, global crises and problems.
Global problems are the problems that affect the interests of every person, every country, humanity as a whole. They have a planetary, international character, manifest themselves as an objective factor in the development of society in all regions of the planet. Their globality is determined, first of all, by the fact that the existence of mankind as a whole depends on their solution and that they cannot be solved within the framework of individual states or a group of countries.
Global problems are interrelated, but conditionally they can be divided into three groups: intersocial, environmental and anthroposocial.
1) Intersocial problems arise as a result of interaction between states, their unions, and different regions of the planet. The most significant problems of this group include the task of preserving peace and preventing a new world war, overcoming international destabilization, eliminating the uneven economic development of different countries and regions, combating international terrorism, etc. The most important problems of this group are the following.
2) Ecological problems arose as a result of the interaction between society and nature, which led in the mid-twentieth century to the catastrophic destruction of the natural basis for the existence of world civilization. These are environmental pollution and depletion of natural resources (soil, fuel reserves, energy, raw materials, water), the need to develop the World Ocean and space, etc.
3) Anthroposocial problems are the problems related to the interaction between man and society: demographic problem, health care problems, preservation of human gene pool and prevention of genetic catastrophe, etc. The study of the global problems began in 1968.
The reasons for the emergence of global problems are, first of all, the increasing impact of mankind on nature and the growing scope (scale) of its economic activities, which is comparable to geological and other natural planetary processes. Another reason is the predatory nature of man’s attitude to nature. Therefore, the main direction in solving global problems is not only the improvement of technological processes according to the type of natural ones, but also the achievement of a high level of ecological culture of all mankind.