How Easy Is It Really To Predict The Future?

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It takes skill and knowledge to predict the future. In fact, most scientific methods kind of revolve around this notion. Scientists and researchers spend their time studying, documenting, and theorizing how stuff behaves. Once they have a working theory, they repeat experiments under identical conditions to see if the process and outcome repeat as well.

As an example, someone theorized at some point that objects are somehow always pulled towards the earth. This eventually turned out to be gravity. Smart people began theorizing and documenting how objects behave under gravity.

So far, so good. But if we can study and predict phenomena like this, what about our futures? I mean my future, your future, and possibly humanity’s future. Would it be possible to do that? If so, how? If not, why? These are the questions that I’ll be answering in this article. To begin, let’s look at a short history of humanity in predicting our future.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

Postcards to Predict the Future from 1900

Let’s start with the image of the following postcard.

Flying Balloons and Blimps

This is an image of a postcard from Germany in 1900 that visualizes the future in the year 2000. Conveniently for us, the year 2000 was 21 years ago (at the time of writing this article). So, we have a pretty good idea about how those predictions turned out. In this particular image, we see balloons and blimps carrying people.

While these things did exist in 2000, it is safe to say that we became a much more advanced species by then, with fighter jets and space vehicles to start the argument. Let’s just say that this postcard was a bit off on its prediction. Luckily for us, the Germans made more of these postcards, and we have more data to work with. Let’s look at a second one:

Walk on Water

In this postcard from 1900, people have developed the strange wish to walk on water using mini balloons by 2000.

The fact that a four-legged horse is pulling a cart nonchalantly on water makes this picture all the more hilarious. But here’s the catch. It was probably not as funny when this postcard was released. People were probably genuinely fascinted and enthusiastic about such a futuristic prediction back then. To drive home the point, let’s look at one more of these postcards from 1900.

Underwater Ship-Train-Thing

In this one, a ship is riding on rails that have been built underwater by 2000.

At first sight, this looks outright stupid. But when I looked into it deeper, I asked myself the following question:

“What problem were the people from 1900 trying to solve with this prediction by the year 2000?”

Then it occurred to me. It could have been a solution to solve docking during low tides or on shallow waters. It could have been an attempt to predict the development of amphibious vehicles of the future. Either way, this prediction did not come to fruition; at least not in this form.

Were we always this bad at predicting our future? Let’s look at examples of some of the biggest innovators from the past trying to predict the future.

Examples of Future Predictions by Innovators of the Past

“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris” — One of the inventors of the aeroplane — Orville Wright in 1908.

“Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances” — Radio pioneer — Le De Forest in 1957.

“I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.” — Rocket scientist — Wernher von Braun in 1972.

“By the year 2000, fifty thousand people will be living and working in space.” — Rocket scientist — Robert Traux in 1980.

As you can see, the quotes speak for themselves and need no further explanation. We have indeed been terrible at predicting the future. Just because we live in the present now, have things changed? To understand what is going on with our prediction capabilities, we need to understand two fundamental types of processes in nature.

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Nature Decides Predictability

You see, in nature, phenomena can be broadly classified into 2 types: reversible processes and irreversible processes. With reversible processes, we are generally able to apply science and eventually predict well. Think about Newton’s third law, for instance, as a reversible process.

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” — Newton’s third law.

What this means is that it does not matter if a ball hits a bat or the bat hits the ball, the process can be approached from both ends. That is, the phenomenon is symmetrical in behaviour, and is largely time-independent. Most of physics and most other (known) sciences exist in this realm of reversible processes.

Irreversible processes on the other hand are one-way trips. Once something happens, it cannot be reversed. These processes are also time-dependent or quasi-time-dependant. Consider an ice cube that is melting into a puddle of water. Sure enough, as you see the ice cube, you can recognize its shape and describe it. If you know of the shape of the ice cube and certain other environmental conditions, you can use complex equations to predict how the water puddle will look like after the ice melts. This is, in a way, predicting the future.

But what if I presented to you a random-looking puddle of water and asked you to predict what it looked like in the past? Was it a block of ice? If you think so, what was its shape? Or was it something completely different, like seawater?

Predicting the Past to Predict the Future

Do you realise what is going on with the water puddle example? If you do not know of the water puddle’s past, you have no way of predicting what it was either. This is a typical example of an irreversible process. They are time-dependent. If you miss either direction of time in the process, prediction is unlikely.

All of the postcard predictions and quotes we saw previously had the knowledge of the past, but did not have the knowledge of the future (the opposite situation compared to the water puddle example). They belong to the category of irreversible processes as well. Therefore, predictions are unlikely.

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To Predict the Future, We Need to Travel through Time

If you are a person reading this article with a thermodynamic background or information theory background, you’ll recognize this concept straight away. When it comes to predictions with irreversible processes, we are essentially dealing with entropy. In a rough sense, entropy means randomness. Pure randomness is unpredictable by definition.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an irreversible process only increases with time. This phenomenon is called ‘law’ for a reason. Throughout human history, there has not been a single occurrence that disproves this statement; hence the ‘law’.

Considering our universe as a system with irreversible processes, we see that the entropy or randomness only increases with time. A weak proof for this would be the concept of information. As time flows, the amount of information in our universe only increases. A new day brings with it more information on top of yesterday; you end up with more information today as compared to yesterday. This only increases the entropy.

In short, if human beings can reduce (or reverse) entropy over time, it would mean that we can predict the future of (currently) irreversible processes as well. This also means that we would be able to travel through time since we have essentially converted inherently irreversible processes into reversible ones. Time would practically become meaningless if that were to happen. Until then, we will be just as terrible with our future predictions as our forefathers were. That doesn’t, of course, mean that it is going to stop us from trying to predict the future.

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Credit: The work I have done with the post cards and quotes was inspired by the presentation: The Future of Colonizing Space by Neil deGrasse Tyson in 2018 at the World Government Summit.

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Further reading that might interest you: How Imagination Helps You Get Good At Mental Math? and Why Are Analogue Computers Really On The Rise Again?