Recently, the History Channel brought together six of the leading futurists in the world to discuss America’s leading challenges and what can be done to address and, hopefully, resolve them.

At the end of the meeting, there was a degree of consensus and the good news was that the solutions do not have to be all bad and perhaps the lesson was that the best answer was to rethink what we have been doing and consider what we should have doing all along. Nor do the solutions, as discussed, necessarily involve pain or unnecessary hardship but a willingness to deal with change.

But while this was the good news, these experts all had dire warnings about what was happening around us and our failure to prepare ourselves for the dangers ahead.

These experts in various fields who’s concern for the future caused them to come together, talked about a diverse range of subjects, their own spheres of interest and concern, that ranged from the economy, the threat of economic dislocation, the prospect of terrorism and nuclear weaponry, the prospect that the solutions we come up with to address these needs, the prospect for intelligent devices that could perhaps turn on us as they grow in capacity, to the shortages we shall face of oil, food, and, perhaps the most threatening challenge of all, the absence or pollution of the one resource we cannot do without, water .

What’s more, each warned that we were much further along in crisis than anyone might have imagined and as the leading expert on finances suggested, there is a kind of “cognitive dissonance” that tends to shut off a person’s mind when encountering difficulties that would force changes in behavior triggering a kind of reluctance to change that lulls us into apathy, and an unwillingness to perform corrective action. In other words, a kind of resistance, a form of malaise, takes hold that impedes our ability to save ourselves in the face of pending disaster.

The first lesson was that we must learn how to overcome this cognitive dissonance if we want to survive the present range of crises we are confronted with.

That being said, each of the Prophets of Doom entered into a dialog that explained their concerns in their particular province of interest.

The financial guru, who left the management of a hedge fund, quit one day when he realized that the whole economic system was in critical danger of collapse and realized that it was impossible to try to resolve a credit problem with more credit.

The reality of the depth of the challenge we face could leave us in deep water without recourse. We could find ourselves confronting an end to the money supply, with the option of creating more money with lessening value as a poor solution; and no potential solutions on the horizon that are palatable; nonetheless, our Prophet of Doom and guru of the financial world also suggested that at the same time, this dire scenario didn’t spell the end of the world, that there were measures that could be taken to improve the outcome and that man could live under a different set of circumstances but it was the chaos that preceded the new order of things that might impose the greatest hardship and contribute to the greatest disequilibrium.

As was suggested, the story of every Empire is rise and fall. And the analogy to ancient Rome was singled out in the dialog where Rome was overextended, trying to maintain its presence around the world as its economy fell into disrepair; much of that is very similar to what we face today and understanding the challenges that faced Rome at that time might be useful in helping mankind change the outcome with purpose and resolve.

One of the speakers indicated that man’s tendency to ignore problems of the first magnitude suggested that perhaps we all needed some kind of environmental cue to alert us to oncoming dangers that threaten our way of life. The example cited, was toilet paper. If it is learned that the supplies of toilet paper were being exhausted, we could take corrective measures. If we were alerted, however, after the fact, we would need to come up with more complex alternatives or just settle for the condition imposed by our own inability or unwillingness to meet the challenge.

Another one of the prophets, John Cronin, who heads up the Beacon Institute of Water and Energy, a group that is in the process of developing a network of professionals for monitoring and reporting on water quality, said that the biggest challenge we may face may be the unavailability or contamination of water; that there is only so much water and the fact that we have been very wasteful with ours, not unlike the ancient Sumarians who’s culture literally disappeared because of their wasteful practices with water. For without water, no society or culture can long survive.

As John Cronin points out, we are a water economy because everything is more or less dependent on the quality and volume of water. But in truth, water is at a crisis level around the world.

We already find signs around many cities that suggest that having fish for dinner more than once a week may prove hazardous to your health. Consider that in San Francisco alone, fish are being hauled in that are already poisoned by caffeine. Why? Because the processing plants do not have a way to process out the caffeine that enters into the water system; nor for that matter, do they have the ability to remove the exotic chemicals that we introduce into the water from our drugs and other chemicals we routinely introduce in a variety of ways into our existing sources for fresh water.

I will continue this discussion in my next blog edition.