"I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem." -- Richard Feynman
One of the most confusing things about our imagination is when it takes us to a place we can't go to yet. We may well be able to reach that place one day, but not now.
We know the universe is vast and that the odds of other inhabitable worlds are extremely good. We also know that the sun will ultimately explode and die, rendering life on this planet impossible. So for our species to survive we will eventually have to travel.
While we believe all these things to be true, our ability to do anything about them is apparently limited by the laws of physics. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, suggests none of those constraints are immutable -- that space and time and consciousness are all figments of our imagination.
Thinking too hard about all this will take us around the circle Feynman so eloquently described. There is no escape (for now).
But some of us yearn to break away from the constraints that bind us to current reality. Perhaps none more than journalists, who are stuck covering reality in its gritty detail every day. That is where some combination of art and fiction come in, as our most imaginative impulses take the form of music, dance, painting, sculpture, film, novels, short stories, poems and more.
These help deliver the future to us. Meanwhile, predicting it is, at best, a crap shoot.
The book "Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction," by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, describes a massive effort by an army of volunteers to forecast global events. According to this research, once they given the best evidence, about two percent of those involved prove to be "super forecasters," able with uncanny accuracy to figure out what is going to happen next about almost anything.
Alas, I’m not one of those.
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