Who among us hasn’t wanted to know the future? Who we’ll become, what discoveries await us… As children, probably almost everyone dreams of that. But over the years, that desire seems to fade into the background—at least, it did for me. The longer I live, the less I want to know what lies ahead. That knowledge often feels too frightening. I want to believe that everything will be okay, that my children and grandchildren won’t face the horrors previous generations endured, not to mention all the disasters that are constantly being fed to us from every direction.
Unfortunately, reality doesn’t care about what we want. And even now, we see things we never imagined we would.
It was at just such a moment that I came across a mention of George Friedman’s book The Next 100 Years, where he predicts how our civilization might live through the 21st century.
Here’s what the Russian publisher Eksmo writes about George Friedman on their website:
George Friedman is a political scientist from the United States, founder and head of the private intelligence company STRATFOR. The company specializes in gathering and analyzing data in the fields of geopolitics, national security, and economics. As the organization’s lead expert, Friedman works alongside a professional team of analysts to collect macroeconomic and political information from a wide range of sources and develop geopolitical strategies. His books are also devoted to these topics.
In other words, the author doesn’t make predictions out of thin air—he bases them on a deep understanding of geopolitical realities and the patterns that shape the development of civilizations. This is his professional field of expertise.
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