Suppose that we could time travel, as envisioned by H.G.Wells, to the year 2025. As we disembark the time machine, we investigate which global and transnational problems have been addressed successfully and which have not. For example, what will be the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by then? From 1982 to 2002, twenty million people died from AIDS and twice that number became infected. Will a vaccine have been developed by 2025, or will the disease have decimated parts of Africa and Asia, there by curtailing the projected population growth in the developing world? Will transnational terrorism by independent groups be the number one security concern in 2025 as it is today? Will so-called rogue states that operate outside of the norms of the global community have acquired weapons of mass destruction that they then use to threaten other countries? By 2025, will the corn belt of the American Midwest have moved northward into Canada as global warming heats the atmosphere? Such a visit to the future would provide insights about those problems where actions have occurred and those where they have not. For the former, one must identify what factors promoted action and, for the latter, what considerations inhibited solutions.

The greatest discovery and insights from time traveling would involve two types of observations. First, one would learn in this “future perfect” exercise what problems will have emerged that no one foresees today. These may involve technological impacts that nobody has been clever enough to portend, or they may include stresses on the ecosphere that appear only after an unforeseen threshold has been surpassed.