Barbara Marx Hubbard (born Barbara Marx; December 22, 1929 – April 10, 2019) was an American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with the concepts of "The Synergy Engine" and the "birthing" of humanity. Early life and education A Jewish agnostic, Barbara Marx was the first of four children of Irene (née Saltzman) and Louis Marx, a toy maker. In her youth she attended the Dalton School in New York City. She studied at L'Ecole des Sciences Politiques at La Sorbonne in Paris during her junior year of college, and received a B.A. cum laude in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College in 1951. Career As an author, speaker, and co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, Hubbard posited that humanity was on the threshold of a quantum leap if newly emergent scientific, social, and spiritual capacities were integrated to address global crises. She was the author of seven books on social and planetary evolution. In conjunction with the Shift Network, she co-produced the worldwide "Birth 2012" multimedia event. She was the subject of a biography by author Neale Donald Walsch, The Mother of Invention: The Legacy of Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Future of "YOU". Deepak Chopra called her "the voice for conscious evolution". Hubbard was an American modern-day female futurist, carrying her ideas across the millennia. Throughout her life, she had questioned what would make life easier as well as make people happy. For Hubbard, she did not like the molds that were expected out of herself as well as others, and in the 1970s she started speaking at futurist conferences about her findings. Those aided in her interest to the movement and resulted in her attending, speaking at, and creating conferences. With that, she dedicated her life to sharing the potential today's modern world has in achieving a better society and came up with the idea of "birthing" humanity. In 1998, she had written and published a successful book titled “Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential". which was about her futurist ideas in making a better society as well as focusing on what the conscious mind can do if it is aware of its power. Hubbard went as far as creating her own organization called the Committee for the Future and later created others such as Women of Vision in Action, The Alliance for the Advancement of Conscious Evolution as