Memories of the 28th Century

If you pay any heed to predictions, then your choice is between those extremes: entertaining or accurate. The two seldom mix, because the accurate ones simply predict more of the same, while the entertaining one are correct so seldom that you might as well say that they are never right.

If you want the Second Coming of Jesus, or Klaatu (or whatever his name was) to land on the White House lawn, or whatever amusing things phony seers are predicting to happen, then you will have to make it happen, because that’s the only way that it will, because those events are too far away from the trend.

Trends have inertia. They tend to continue until something comes along to end them, unless a new trend starts. That is how many people make money in investments, jump into the popular thing and sit until either something else comes along or it stops being popular."The trend is your Friend>"

You might claim that that is not predicting the future. But it is. You would be predicting that the trend will continue. There is a second step in the predicting; predicting when the trend will stop. Exactly what would stop a trend depends on what field one is looking at. In investments, changes in interest rates are a biggie, as are changes in laws and government policies and international tensions. But remember what kills one trend usually pumps up another trend. For example, a devastating hurricane would cut real estate prices, but it would tend to increase apartment rents. It would also increase the prices of agricultural crops that were raised in that area, and there probably would be other effects. Or to look at feminine fashion trends, when the gorgeous starlette decides to stop wearing slit skirts, she will have to either wear something else or wear nothing, and either of those could become the new trend.

At least as common as predictions that might be accurate are ones that are silly or amusing. That includes the end of the world; always popular and always inaccurate. Someday someone will get that right, but it won’t happen for another twenty billion years, give or take. The Christians are regularly being treated to predictions of the second coming of Jesus, but those are mostly results of misunderstandings of scriptures. Other religions have similar predictions, but those are mostly based on psychotic delusions, so they aren’t reliable as predictions. But there is a huge potential market in end of the world predictions, if you time it correctly. Decide in advance when you will retire, and plan the prediction for something around the same time. Then make some clever way to frame the predictions, and using the Book of Revelations as your alleged source is the best bet. You will have to build up a following of some size, so take your time. Remember this is a career ending prediction, and you want to have accumulated adequate wealth for the rest of your life.

Another type of entertaining prediction that deserves some attention is the prediction of some cosmic disaster: asteroid collision, errant moon, solar flare, etc. Something like that could happen, and the causes for such events are not apparent, so we can’t accurately predict when they will happen. There are many asteroids with orbits that intersect the Earth’s orbit, so it’s a matter of time until there will be another collision. Of course it is also a matter of the size of the colliding body; the grains of sand are not problems, but the mountain-sized asteroids could make a mess of Mother Earth. Fortunately, the grains of sand are much, much more common. Even something as likely as an asteroid may never happen, if all of the ones with intersecting orbits have already made their marks; that is another matter that present science has not determined.

Another fun thing to make predictions about is some social trend, music, fashion, or similar trend. People are constantly making predictions about what will or will not be popular, and some of the predictions lead to the result predicted. So-and-so says something will become popular, and all of the people who think that Old So-and-so is wonderful jump on the trend and make it a trend. The same effect happens regularly with movies, but there have also been some examples of the public going against the critics’ pronouncements.

Regardless of what you decide to make predictions about, keep your emotions out of it. Do not make predictions because you would like something to happen, unless you do what Jonathan Swift did to a “seer” in the “Bickerstaff Papers”; he predicted that a certain astrologer, Mr. Partridge, would die on March 29, 1708. On March 30, 1708 Swift had bulletins distributed that said that Partridge had died. Swift anonymously wrote a response for Partridge and had that delivered to Partridge, who had that response published. “The Bickerstaff Papers” are worth reading for the joy of reading something by Swift, but he made some very wise statements about predictions.

For my own part, I try to avoid making predictions that I cannot make happen.