Hello,

Did you ever look at the Future Timeline?
http://www.futuretimeline.net/

Bertus

 

Take the set of all things predicted by people who predict the future and subtract it from the set of all yet to be invented things (that's a difficult set to create) and what you have left will be the amazing technologies of the future.

The problem with predicting the future is that no one can see how ideas may come together to influence and amplify their effect until after it has happened. Also it seems to be human nature to want to dream and ignore the fundamental laws of physics; gravity, oxygen and water mean we are pretty much stuck on this rock and we have to work with what we have.

 

I just can't wait till 250,000,000 AD. It is going to get a lot cheaper to travel to Europe.

 

If there is still a Europe as we know it!

 

The problem with predicting the future is that no one can see how ideas may come together...

Maybe not NO one. Sci-fi writers often get a lot right, such as Arthur C. Clarke with his global satellite coverage. And occasionally a "futurist" such as Ray Kurzweil can get enough right to get people to listen to him. Really anyone can map out some trends with some thought. It just seems that very few us actually put serious effort into thinking about such things. Too busy updating Facebook or whatever it is people do.

But yeah, anything past 3 decades or so is pretty much a crap shoot. A lot may hinge on whether we get fusion power or not.

 

But yeah, anything past 3 decades or so is pretty much a crap shoot. A lot may hinge on whether we get fusion power or not.

Speaking of which, what happened to fusion? I read an article that said we would have a commercial grade reactor by sometime last October.

 

...
Really anyone can map out some trends with some thought. It just seems that very few us actually put serious effort into thinking about such things. Too busy updating Facebook or whatever it is people do.
...

William Gibson said

"the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"

so as you say it is relatively straight forward to make near future predictions. What is often left out of the the thinking is the human element, no one predicted social media, or that a search facility would be one of the biggest companies in the world, or that gaming would be bigger than television. The people who think about the future tend only to think in terms of technological advance and leave out how people will interact with and exploit the technology.

Long term I think it's a case of "everything changes and everything stays the same" we evolved as omnivorous hunters; people will still live, love procreate and die, there will still be violence and acts of kindness. Human nature is coded into us.

 

By the way: let us say that you start inventing "predictions" for any time in the future that you actually know is just that, pure creation; could anyone later, in view that they did not came true, say that you where lying? Or just that you were not Nostradamus Jr?

Predicting is nice because it costs you nothing, you won't be there anyway and if luck helps there will be a panegyrist (or many) explaining why.

Many years ago I've read that security people checking real faces against pictures in the ID documents, they do tend to find coincidences before discrepancies. I suspect it is in the hope of not having a problem forcing them to stop the person in front of them.

Have you ever seen people interpreting prophecies or predictions? Some come to extreme far fetched explanations even ridiculous.

Julio Verne was the wiser: he wrote many, became famous, sold a lot and made of my childhood and early adolescence an interesting moment. He only exaggerated in lengthy geographical descriptions (my stumbling block in my early readings).

I predict that it's going to rain in the next two hours.

----

As it has been for the last ten... and meteofa says so.

 

Where?

 

Where?

That is the good of some type of predictions. For the user's (interpreters) there are choices; many if not infinite. Amongst them, Buenos Aires or Tandil.

 

Hello,

Did you ever look at the Future Timeline?
http://www.futuretimeline.net/

Bertus

A rather impressive collection of predictions... thanks for sharing!