Trying to predict the Future

We always want to know with different levels of interest and urgency what the future brings. We would like to know our personal future and how other people might behave and obviously, we want to know what the weather will be tomorrow. We are also interested to know, in which direction certain situations and the world in general develop in short-term, medium-term and long term. We know that nobody knows but we nevertheless try to obtain predictions from whoever volunteers to make them. ‘Predictions are difficult – especially when they concern the future’. This is how you can put it. We also know that our lives would be entirely different – even impossible - if we knew precisely and, in all details, ahead of time what happens in future with us and with the world. We would not have the illusion of a free will because we don’t have to make decisions if we already know what is coming up. Our lives are animated and driven by the fact that we don’t know our future. We live under the condition that we don’t know. If God knows, is a different question for theologians and for philosophers. This question makes only sense if we assume firstly that God exists and secondly that he can have knowledge, which assumption requires that we anthropomorphize God and treat God as an entity that possess human characteristics. I talk about these issues in the essay about Gods, Religions and Churches. For those who believe that God is able to know, the short answer is that he is omniscient, that he knows everything, including our future, and that he does not let us know. We can use different methods how to satisfy our curiosity about the future. We can ask fortune tellers or psychics or can use crystal balls or astro-charts. If we are adventurous, we can ask economists. But I think that they are only slightly more reliable than crystal balls. We might also use a chatbot with artificial intelligence to tell us the future. We finally can use methods that are more scientific. One of these methods, which business people and some economists prefer, is to make forecasts based on information, data and on statistics from the past from which we might extract some trends. These trends can then give us a vague idea into which directions things might move in future. A holy book might announce that a terrible cataclysm will happen some time in the future. But the hope that nothing catastrophic will happen – at least not during our lives - keeps most of us going. Only few people, mostly in doomsday sects, commit suicide to escape the forecast of a catastrophe. If we don’t base our predictions using one or all of the methods above, gut feelings – as always in decision-making – creep in and define our forecast. In this essay, I give some examples of mostly inaccurate predictions that people have made in the past. I then add some predictions of our future that I have based on some casual information and facts but mostly using my gut feelings. I am quite optimistic about future developments of science and technology like gene editing, quantum computing, nuclear fusion and cultivated meat despite serious risks that new technologies harbor. I am not very optimistic that humans will be able to stop global warming by reducing CO2 emissions. But I am optimistic that mankind will be able to neutralize some negative effects of global warming. I am not equally optimistic about the chances of survival of the US and the EU and of liberal democracies in general. They have reached the end of their useful lives. But even if democracies don’t survive because they have no self-healing capacities, and even if other political systems also don’t survive, it is in medium term no major problem for mankind. Political systems always come and go and mankind has so far always survived political changes and all other changes. Mankind will continue to survive unless a natural or a man-made catastrophe destroys all human beings. But even in such a case, another cycle of human evolution might start because it is very likely that some biological leftovers, like DNA of humans, survive the catastrophe and will be the basis for another cycle of human evolution that we can call reincarnation of mankind.