Purpose -This paper seeks to be a thought experiment. If the field of futures were invented today, it asks, what would it look like? What would be its intellectual foundations? Who would it serve and influence? And how would its ideas and insights be put into practice? Design/methodology/approach -It reviews the literatures on experimental psychology and neuroscience to identify biases that affect people's ability to think about and act upon the future, studies of expertise that map the limits of professional judgment, and recent work on the nature of critical challenges of the twenty-first century.Findings -It argues that futurists could develop social software tools, prediction markets, and other technologies to improve the individual and collective accuracy and impact of work. Choice architectures and nudges to lengthen ''the shadow of the future'' of everyday choices made by ordinary people could also be used.Research limitations/implications -The paper argues for new directions in the practice of futures, to make the field better-suited to deal with the challenges confronting an increasingly complex, chaotic, and contingent world. Practical implications -The development of tools to augment professional activity, and adoption of choice architectures and nudges as media for communicating about the future, could improve futures work and its impact, but lay the foundation for other methodological innovations.Originality/value -The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about where futures should go.

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According to articles and books published at the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction of photography to astronomy was one of the most notable events in the discipline in a period chock full of important inventions and amazing discoveries. Edward Holden, director of the Lick Observatory in California, between 1887 and 1898, was rapturous about the promise of photography: it would simplify astronomical observation, increase the reliability of data and produce permanent records of the heavens untainted by distraction, ill discipline or bias. This would happen, he argued, because of the mechanical virtues of the camera:It does not tire, as the eye does, and refuse to pay attention for more than a small fraction of a section, but it will faithfully record every ray of light that falls upon it even for hours and finally it will produce its automatic register [ctdot ] [that] can be measured, if necessary, again and again. The permanence of the records is of the greatest importance, and so far as we know it is complete [ctdot ] We can hand down to our successors a picture of the sky, locked in a box.