"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." - Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project.
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." - Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977.
Recheck the quotes above. The quotes were the result of world class research, feasibility studies and understanding of known facts by people who were considered experts in their respective domains. These are a few shining examples of our inability to foresee change.There are lots more. For a simpler example, tune in to the daily weather forecasts.
What could be the reasons behind our fundamental lack of grasp over the future.
Nature appears placid and calm without showing many external signs of change till a critical point in time is reached, as if she is waiting for the internal conditions to be really ripe and once this internal condition is met, the external form factor changes dramatically! Tough to predict this integrally, since even our deep studies are physical in essence and deal with surface realities which have to be seen or measured to be believed,usually by which time the effect is already on threshold and prediction becomes irrelevant .Simple examples are Volcanoes and Avalanches, A complex example could be the rise or fall of a Nation or an Advent of A New Age and the Crash of old forms and structures.
Things move at an accelerated rate after a critical point is reached.
Chain reactions are precisely that. They implode or explode in geometric progression and the rate of movement is tough to determine if the process which accelerates or fuels the change also undergoes change itself or is subject to forces which change based on intercepting conditions. A simple example is an explosion.
If we increase the degree of complexity by bringing in the human touch and the occult forces into perceiving and creating change while also being a part of it, the problem almost becomes mind boggling. Change itself is accelerating in our current times !! It takes fewer years now to change your perspective, or change views or change the way we live or for the landmarks of your city to change compared to corresponding changes in these 'variables' a decade back. So handling change is one thing, but if change itself accelerates, predicting the future becomes tougher by a degree. Whats the impact of this on the human mind? Why should we predict change ? Well a good prediction can save a few thousand lives or make a few million dollars ! A good understanding of the future can help channelize peoples thoughts and help bring about a more concerted effort towards realizing or averting that very future we envisage or predict !! This almost brings us to the panchatantra story where the King challenges the soothsayer to predict his own moment of death with a sword in his hand ready to contradict whatever the soothsayer predicts.But thats a fairly simple scenario.How about global changes ?Who exactly turns the wheel of change and who is being turned . Can we look past the maze of infinite variables which determine or propel the direction and rate of change of which we seem to be a part in varying degrees.
We might live in different nations, but more fundamentally we live in mildly differing tense* . A very tiny fraction of the population lives in the past ( as tibals,aborigins etc whose way of life is still the way it was probably before the metal ages) . A large part of the population live as food gatherers of the medieval past ( leading life based on agriculture , horticulture , farming etc etc) .A portion of the population live in the present times. This classification based on tense, is fundamental and has more relevance than national divide as it is the real basis of psychological reactions to truth irrespective of culture and nation. Culture shock is a misnomer, what shocks us when we interact with people is not the difference of culture but the mild difference of tense. One will be comfortable with a Chinese or an American as long as both perceive things at the same rate irrespective of ones dress, accent or 'culture' . The real difference lies in pace.Even among the urban groups of the same country, if the divide were cultural we would'nt have so many psychological clashes. The difference lies in tense and time. Some are obsolete, some are apt and some are futuristic. Thats the fundamental divide. The pace of evolution itself which affects all of us could hopefully bridge this gap among people all over the world by bridging the gulf of tense. I personally think this is hapenning every where around us with an increasing rapidity by a strange force of nature which seems to be almost pressing us into the future.
We all think our future is in our own hands. Is it the 'hands' that were created by our past habits or the 'hands' of the present with a will to act based on the current moment or is it the hands of the future trying to strangely determine or influence the current events to fulfill its own secret prophesy ? Or is it all three in varying measures ? It gets more and more clear that using the method of science and statistical analysis is pretty slow and self limiting and certainly, if we are dealing with extrapolations of variables to determine results, we are doomed to commit big mistakes. We might get small trends rite, but what matters the most appears as elusive as ever. What matters most is a state of errorlessness, of certainty, of non linear vision and a direct perception of the universe without limits . What matters most is non dependence on huge self limiting structures which were created based on past compulsions. What matters most is a supra abundance of knowledge which completes knowledge. Future predictions are doomed to fail if we don't see the whole . And what matters the most is a vision of the whole, the lack of which probably vexed man since he first began to think.If this was his first problem, an answer or response to what matters most to him could very well be his veiled future. Till then, the return and crash of imperfect forms and a haphazard growth of consciousness may come in handy. A safe prediction would be a fall out of old forms and structures to give place to new ones combined with an increased sense of transience of everything whose permanence was taken for granted in the past.Today,we see shifting forms resulting in an ever greater exodus of humanity towards a critical point in the future.After all, that is nature's style of working and we can collaborate with her to hasten that glorious future which in the grand scheme of things is already inevitable.
*( tense - noun form - dictionary reference of time, as past, present, or future,
expressed by such a category )
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