David Passig INTRODUCTION Future Studies is a field that began to develop in an established way during the Second World War, when armies were required to make what were called at the time “five-year plans.” This endeavor was developed primarily to plan the movement of forces during future battles, logistics, and so on. Over the years, hundreds of methodologies were developed, with whose help futurists studied future trends in various areas and ranges of time (Armstrong, 2001). Nevertheless, thinkers and leaders continued to make projections, and developed various estimates of future developments without availing themselves of proven research tools. As opposed to the latter, the futurists of the 20th century militated for the establishment and development of methods for evaluating trends whose validity could be monitored and whose reliability could be measured. When the field was, to a certain extent, expropriated from the thinkers and leaders, the state of mind, or skill, which had guided the thinkers in the fashioning of their evaluations of the future, was lost to the researchers of Future Studies. This article focuses on one of the characteristics of the state of mind which led the thinkers to evaluate future trends. In this article we maintain that Future-Time-Span is a state of mind that characterized thinkers in ancient times. With the help of FTS they succeeded in making future evaluations, and in assessing their significance and implications—basing their thinking on the jumble of information that was available to them, on their value emphases, and on their personal styles. The goal of this article is to define the nature of this state of mind or skill, to illustrate it with examples, and to begin to develop tools, or to harness existing tools, so that it may be bequeathed to the leaders of the future. In this article, we will attempt to bring back this skill to the collective state of mind of…
