In August of last year I wrote, somewhat crankily, that
...Our technological society’s one big blind spot is that we can imagine everything about ourselves and our world changing except how we make decisions.
By this I meant that we avidly consume stories where the entire Earth is eaten by nanotech, or where bio-genetic revolutions change the human species, or where cheap space flight opens up the universe—but these futures are almost always ruled over by autocratic megacorporations, faceless bureaucracies, voting democracies or even hereditary aristocrats. (After thousands of years of civilization, that galaxy far far away still keeps slaves.) Technology changes in SF, and even human nature gets altered by implants and uploading and perpetual life—but how governments work? Not so much.
Science fiction has a cousin—another genre of stories set in the future. Governments, corporations and militaries worldwide use scenarios and scenario fictions to explore strategic alternatives. They aren’t trying to predict the future—that’s impossible. What they’re trying to do is build resilience into their planning process. One of the most famous of these ongoing foresight efforts belongs to Shell, which most famously used scenario-based planning to ride out the energy crisis of 1979 and come out far ahead of its competitors. 
Well, NASA’s made another of their cryptic pronouncements about “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Today’s press conference, streamed live over NASA TV at 2:00 p.m. EST, should fill us in on the details.
