You know those scenes in Star Trek and Star Wars where Spock and C-3PO calculate the odds of successful whatever (e.g., navigating an asteroid field)? Great fun, helps drive the plot, but impossible. They can’t calculate the odds because they don’t have enough information.
The realistic approach when you don’t have enough information is to run simulations many times. We know these simulations are based on incomplete information, so they’re inherently “wrong but useful.” We can get some idea of the range of possibilities, rather than a specific number. We can see where our “gut” response might be wildly off, or relatively aligned.
Appreciating the limits of your predictive power is crucial to being a wise person. Consider the track record of predictions made about
Tomorrow’s weather, next winter snowfall, and the number of hurricanes
Costs for commodity products like oil, grain, and copper
Outcomes of political elections
Which geopolitical events will drive the news
Who gets cancer or has a heart attack or stroke
We should humbled by our miserable ability to accurately predict the future.
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As a kid I loved time machine stories. The idea of being able to go back in time to experience an event is loads of fun. I especially like something I saw on TV once – can’t remember the title of the show – where people from the future built a time machine to figure out what started the global nuclear war. They thought if they understood this, they could find a way to prevent it from happening. It turns out that their invention of the time machine was the catalyst. Everyone wanted it so they could go back in time and kill their enemies or get rich or secure their power.
I can remember walking in a park in Cleveland when I was in college, thinking about time travel. It dawned on me that time travel would require bridging both time and physical space. The earth spins. The earth rotates around the sun. Our solar system is rotating around a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The galaxy is racing along as part of the expansion of the universe. How could you accurately calculate the right place to ‘appear’ back in time given all these axes of movement?
The value of time machine stories is to contemplate the precious nature of the present, in the flow of time that includes the past and the future. We don’t control time; we can only control ourselves, and that’s enough.
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People watch Star Trek and think “I want the phasers, warp drive, transporters, and the holodeck.”
Those would be pretty nifty, but I’d start with the sensors and computer systems, then I want the artificial gravity. Then, the inertial dampers – it’s quite a trick to go from X times the speed of light to an instant full stop without splattering yourself on the forward bulkhead.
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Technology breakthroughs happen, they’re coming faster, and they do transform the way we live and perceive the world.
Almost no one alive has memories of what life was like before World War 1. It was remarkably different than what we have experienced in the last 100 years. There were many kings, queens, and emperors, and frequent wars between countries. Extensive colonies and mercantilism were the norm. Segregation was legal; institutional racism and fixed class structures were common worldwide. Ships and trains were the way to travel long distances, not planes; letters, not email. Newspapers ruled, radio was still new, electricity was uncommon, TV was unknown, no satellites, no GPS, no mobile phones. No plastic. No antibiotics aside from sulfa and herbal remedies, and only primitive vaccines. Medicine was still fundamentally the same practice it had been for 400 years, albeit with the concept of germ theory. About half of your children would die before they were 12 years old. Wood and coal were the most common means of heating a home, and no one had air conditioning. Indoor plumbing existed but sewage treatment plants were a futurist concept. Cars were uncommon and a minority of roads were paved. Natural disasters and work accidents killed many thousands of people annually. There was limited global commerce. Most everything you owned and nearly all the food you ate was produced within 200 miles of your home.
100 years is a blink in the span of human existence.
I wonder what some writing in 2123 will say about the remarkable differences between their contemporary life and 2023. I’ll bet they’re still talking about the problems of being human, with all our weaknesses and struggles, about relationship challenges, and how to manage organizations, and reading biographies for clues about working past rapid change and conflicts.
