Predicting the Future

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.

High rates of change

This problem is made much worse in our modern society by the high and exponential rates of change. Today technology is driving societal change faster than any time in recorded human history.

The exponential effect is practically hard to deal with. A good example is Moore's law which states that the number of cell in a computing chip doubles every 18 months. This then drives run away changes in computer power and world communication.

We consider the amount of change that occurred in the 20th century as a change unit of one. If we then look at the amount of change from known exponential effects in the first 25 years of the 21st century, we can expect five units of change. By the end of the 21st century we could expect 200.

Society is simply going to have great difficulty dealing with change at this rate. Settling the Moon could be a minor accomplishment against this background of mind boggling change.

This effect also makes it useless to try to predict the future beyond a few tens of years except in the most general terms. Perhaps one reason for even trying is to help us mentally handle the high rage of change.

A few good people

A few people do seem to have the knack of predicting the future. 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. Nothing helps us deal with problems so much as being in positive action.

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.

There are a lot more ideas on the Purposes List.