A Fool's Game

Predicting the future is a fool's game; that’s why I don’t do it. “What do you mean?” you may ask. “You wrote a book about the future, in fact, a future so eonic that numbers fail to quantify the time involved.” This is true. If there is a defining characteristic of living forever, it’s constantly navigating an unfolding future. Yet there is a critical clarification: I don’t predict the future; I make it up—Nostradamus I am not. I’m just a humble scribe, a “harmless drudge” inventing stories for your entertainment.

And even here I am cautious. Many climate predictions have missed the mark, including premature reports that Arctic ice would be severely diminished by 2016. I, for one, don’t want to find myself in that situation. So in my book, when I first mentioned any major changes in Earth’s climate, I made sure I waited 10 million years into the future. That way, if I’m wrong, there probably won’t be any copies of my book left, testaments to my ignorance of future events. And to really secure the deal, there won’t even be any traces of our civilization, so I think I have all the bases covered.

Even the English language is wise enough to avoid future predictions since it has no future tense. That is, there aren’t any words altered for exclusive use to describe future events. For example, the word “go” has “gone” and “went” for past events. But to talk about the future, you at least need the use of an auxiliary verb, such as “will” or “can,” as in “will go” and “can go.” Is this collective wisdom, an unconscious consensus that the future could be anything—so why bother making special words for it?

Yet, in spite of our language’s syntactic wariness, people still insist on making predictions. Here are some that didn’t fare so well:

• Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell his telephone patents to Western Union for $100,000, and the company’s president, William Orton, famously dismissed the invention: "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" This shortsightedness could be forgiven because the telegraph was the standard of the day. The information transmitted was precise and resulted in a hard copy for reference. Early phones were crackly and hard to understand, and no record of the event was made. Western Union eventually saw the light, but by then Alexander Graham Bell had already established a monopoly.
• Industry pioneers once claimed that television was a "commercial impossibility" that lacked the essential social draw of the cinema. They believed the public would eventually tire of the experience, convinced that the new technology was little more than a "toy" or a temporary "fad." "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night," claimed an anonymous San Franciscan. After all, they reasoned, why give up the grandeur of the cinema to stare at a striated black-and-white screen? Well, we slackers did, and TV continues its evolution as streaming on-demand videos further stress the movie industry.
• The New York Times severely criticized Goddard’s study of rocket technology.  To them, it was clear that a rocket would never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere:
  
  ..after the rocket has reached a certain height, where the air becomes so thin as to provide no support, the thing would be as helpless as a person trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps. — New York Times, January 13, 1920
  
  It was mistakenly believed that in order for a projectile to work, it would have to push against something. So any lift generated would only happen from the thrust making contact with the ground. But we know that Newton’s Third Law prevails: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Just moving exhaust out of the rocket’s base is sufficient action to move the rocket. Interestingly enough, The Times actually published a retraction 49 years later, when Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon.

However, not everyone got it wrong:

• In an era where transactions were by cash, or credit was restricted to known participants, Edward Bellamy, in his book Looking Backward, makes a remarkable prediction. He says by the year 2000, government payments would be issued via a “credit-card,” a term coined by Bellamy. He anticipated a cashless society and the use of a single, standardized tool for global transactions.
• Then there is the prediction of predictions; it speaks for itself:
  
  When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain... We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face... and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” — Nikola Tesla, Collier’s Weekly, January 30, 1926

Looking at these examples, I am even more convinced that predicting the future is not for me. Not so much my fear of coming up with a ridiculous prediction, but the fact I can’t possibly see things as brilliantly as Nikola Tesla. Though in a way, this frees me from trying to be right. Instead, I can let my imagination roam, making up alternate histories that do not have to pan out.