This is Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Amusing But Not Futurism.

You say, “foresight or futures thinking for me isn’t merely about extrapolating trends and creating future scenarios. It’s more about seeing the systems that form our world as they currently are from different perspectives. Because it is only when we realize that alternative realities exist, that we become actual designers of our future as opposed to drifters of some future.”

As some one with multiple degrees and consulting career in alternative futures research, there are a few problems with what you do and say.

• As much as I enjoy Ripley, a list of unconnected factoids is just that.
• There are ONLY five things one can know about the future — trends, events, images and actions, and all trends end.
• There is both linear and nonlinear change, just as there’s linear/Darwinian, nonlinear and directed evolution.
• The original utility of language was for sharing scenarios, making it the single most unique property of humans.
• It’s not just about “systems,” rather nested evolving systems. ALL systems exist within prior systems and thus always form a nested evolving ecosystem with a directionality as to how new systems can emerge.
• Every individual evolving system has a finite number of generic outcomes or realities, but the vast majority of those are dead-ends/extinction.
• To become a designer of “our” future you must understand where you are evolutionarily located within your target evolving system, and the nested evolving systems most directly impacting in it to discern the system’s finite options.
• Short of fully considering the above variables you are drifting randomly.

On my Medium publication, A Passion to Evolve, there are numerous articles on these topics. For example:

Longish, but readable and graphically detailed is Macroscopic Evolutionary Paradigm

Shorter is A Message From the Bow of Civilization

Doc Huston