We all have the same 168 hours a week. Any set of actuarial tables will help you estimate how much future YOU have left--probably enough to do whatever you want. If your question was not personal, but dealt with society's issues, it's much more complicated, because some of the most critical issues may involve what is called "a step function," that is, an extremely sudden change which is irreversible in a time frame available for action.

Historically, an example is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which launched a rapid concatenation of events now called World War I. Its far from clear whether some of our potentially most important pending issues, like Greenhouse Warming, will involve step functions, or whether changes will be smoothly continuous and in some significant time frame, stoppable and reversible.

A high probability step function would be a nuclear exchange by the big powers. It is not at all clear how likely a step function is should a minor power setting off a bomb. Another potentially impending step function is market collapse, a la 1929. But we have learned so much since that we have a pretty good package of safeguards to prevent the market from plummeting (a step function).

Let me generalize this with regard to any issues that concern you. Explore on your own, or inquire with specialists whether step function changes are likely or even plausible. The question of how much future we have--with regard to maintaining a "good state"-- has to relate to the likelihood of step function changes, whether we have any safeguards or monitoring with regard to those step functions and whether there are any measures we can take to make precipitous change less likely.

So how much time we have, depends on the problem. Keep in mind, that from the present point of view, there is no single future but only a range of plausible alternatives. Central to all futures thinking is that we can act or intervene to make the undesirable less likely and the desirable more likely.

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