Studying the future has captured the minds of not only
scholars and leaders, but also the general public. In the late 1930s, people became
so intrigued with predicting and planning the future that the magazine Tomorrow: the Magazine of the Future, first
published in 1938 to call for studying the future using specific methodologies,
suggested the creation of a Ministry for the Future to collect data from around
the world for studying and comparing the effects of the latest developments and
discoveries on the human race.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, much of the research
on the future focused on promoting military planning. For example, the RAND
Corporation worked with the Manhattan Project and other organisations to set up
special plans to deploy armed forces and later to develop space programs. Such
work required a long-term perspective about using means to achieve great goals,
such as landing on the moon and justifying space missions both socially and
economically. The RAND Corporation also contributed specifically to developing
the "scenario technique", which was influenced by military strategist
and systems theorist Herman Kahn. He discussed this technique in his thesis
about thermonuclear war, in which he attempted to analyse the relationship between
weapons development and military strategy in order to study the potential
consequences of a nuclear conflict.
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