Predicting the Future

Predicting the Future is Very Hard

What we are trying to do is harder than you think.

We do it all the time

Predicting the future is something that people do all the time. The surprising thing is how bad we are at it. A thousand monkeys with typewriters could probably do as well.

If we could do it well, it would have been of immense value to us in the evolutionary past. We never evolved the knack, so it must be a very hard thing to do indeed.

A few good people

A few people do seem to have the knack. The writers Jules Vern and Arthur C. Clark both did amazingly well at predicting the future. Perhaps predicting the future is an individual talent that a few people have. Perhaps we are looking for those few people. Or maybe they just got lucky. Or maybe their vision let a new idea come into being.

Lunarpedia and the future

What we are doing here is not so much trying to accurately predict the future as to provide a positive vision of the future that people can work toward.

It does not matter that the particular future we envision happens and we must not get entangled with others over hair-splitting details of things that have not happened.

If we give people a positive vision of the future, people will get into action and some positive version of the future will then happen.

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