I don't see how it's possible to see that far ahead. To presume to spot trends well into 7000 A.D. is just absurd. Stephen Hawking doubts the human race can even last another century, and I don't think he is an oracle either.

Last year a medium sized asteroid was discovered just a couple of weeks before it made its nearest approach to Earth. Now if that rock had hit southern England, let's say, tens of millions of people would have died on impact, and Britain would have been wiped off the face of the Earth. The fact that it had been discovered only weeks before meant that we could have done nothing to prevent it from hitting us. If it had done so, nobody would pay much attention to Sept. 11 anymore.

This example illustrates the utter meaninglessness of looking into the crystal ball by studying even the broad trends. Things can happen which no one can think of, and everything changes. To their credit the authors devote only one third of the book to their crystal ball, but it's still an exercise in futility.

To cite further examples, no one in the early nineteenth century except de Tocqueville saw the rise of both America and Russia. He was only one hundred years ahead of his times - and that's already very impressive. Who by the turn of the century would have thought we could not only fly, but even go to the Moon? And hardly anyone knew then what treasures lay below the ground in the Arabian desert - King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud would have preferred to find water instead. But without cars oil would not have been of much use. Who could have predicted these bone-dry, dirt-poor wanderers in the sand would become the world's richest people? Certainly not the Saudis themselves. And 9/11 could not have happened without Saudi money (whether they liked it or not).

A series of accidents led to a radically unbelievable outcome.

If we had such trouble seeing just one hundred years ahead, the notion you can see anything at all several thousand years ahead is baloney.

No less an authority than Jack Welch, the legendary ex-Chairman of GE, makes it clear in his memoirs that you can't see far into the future. Read his book, Straight from the Gut (which incidentally was published on 9/11/01, an event which even he could not have imagined.) At the end of the book he made some predictions, which he implied were foisted on him by the publisher; but he never said they would necessarily come true.

For historical background I recommend three excellent books on world history: William H. McNeill's The Rise of the West, J.M. Roberts's Penguin History of the World, and Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Margaret Thatcher's Statecraft, Jack Welch's Straight from the Gut, and the latest books by Eric Hobsbaum, Joseph Nye and Henry Kissinger offer intelligent (if not necessarily correct) perspectives on contemporary world and clues to possible future developments. These are good books, much better than this one. All these authors offer some hints on the future, but they never claim to have the last word, let alone seeing thousands of years ahead.

Otherwise, read science fiction instead. Better still, read natural science and standard newspapers.

You are what you eat, they say. Read junk like this, and your brain will be full of it.

The book actually is in three parts - the first is a summary of human history, the second is a analysis of current trends, and the third is a series of looks backward from several points in the future. To be honest, I was hoping for a little more emphasis on the future history part (it's so hard to find any kind of future history, let alone good future history), but the book is actually pretty good as a whole.