Predicting the Future
from Gerhard Holtkamp, 31. December 2010, 19:37
At the end of the year people look back at the events of the past twelve months but also try to look ahead at what to expect for the upcoming year. Some predictions are obviously better than others...
It's New Year's Eve and if you ever thought of Germany as a country with rationally thinking citizens you better stay away from here on this day as astrology rules supreme in the media. Never mind the many studies that have clearly shown that astrology is nothing but humbug come this time of the year and the faces of astrologers are everywhere. And most of them seem to earn more money than I ever had.
Ironically, astrology has helped us to better predict the future: Because emperors and kings in centuries past firmly believed in it they became major sponsors of people studying the stars and thus the likes of Kepler had the means for their investigations and could advance the cause of astronomy. Thanks to astronomy I can solidly predict that four days from now on 4-JAN-2011 the sun will rise partially eclipsed and that at 9:18 local time a maximum eclipse of 70% will be visible from my place.
Actually, this prediction is uncertain. Not the astronomy part mind you but the visibility statement. Whether I can actually see this eclipse will depend on the weather and predicting that is much less certain. The atmosphere as we now know is a chaotic system which puts meteorologists at a clear disadvantage compared to astronomers (even though some bodies in the otherwise so orderly solar system do exhibit chaotic motion).
Yet weather predictions over a few days have become quite reliable. So I can expect the upcoming Tuesday morning to be mostly cloudy and there go my chances of seeing the solar eclipse. My only (not at all unrealistic) hope is that this prediction turns out to be wrong.
Over longer periods however weather reports break down. Nobody can tell me at the moment whether there will be thunderstorms on July 18 at the place where I live. But there is a high probability that this day will be warmer than today as this is right in the middle of summer. And should you travel to India at about that time you can expect monsoon rains.
Climate models have become more advanced in recent years to allow reasonable predictions that the upcoming summer can be expected to be warmer or wetter than usual in a particular region. But predicting exactly how the climate will change over the next few decades is not that straightforward as man himself gets into the loop. With the climate being affected ever more by the activities of mankind it's political decisions as well as nature that will decide how the climate will evolve. Climate models can predict the consequences of those political decisions and hopefully guide us in making the right ones but politics isn't always done with scientific reasoning.
While meteorologists and climatologists can make reasonable predictions over short time spans but fail over longer periods it's the other way around for geologists. Nobody can tell for sure whether a major earthquake will hit tomorrow but over the proverbial geologic timescales something can be said about how the surface of the Earth will change.
Understanding the geologic forces at work geologists have been able to piece together the past history of our globe and with the help of plate tectonics can come up with predictions of how the contintents will split apart and collide to form new continents and mountains etc. tens or hundreds of millions of years from now.
Biologists are not quite as lucky. Although we seem to have a sound understanding how life evolved on this planet any predictions on the future of life on Earth seem to be fraud. Will there still be a homo sapiens 10 million years from now or how will our species have evolved? Will we have used bio-engineering to come up with humans that are custom-made for colonizing planet Mars?
If biologists do any predictions at all they tend to be of a gloomy sort like how many species are expected to die out over the next decade due to the encroachment of man. We are normally more upbeat about our technological future. This often leads to underestimating the many little problems of putting great ideas into practise.
The ISS is way behind its original schedule and the LHC hasn't particularly been on time either. I'm still waiting to be able to navigate with the European Galileo system etc. Yet while delays seem to be the rule rather than the exception with big projects predictions of how our technological world will evolve over the next decade or two are usually not too far off. After all there actually is an ISS and LHC in place right now!
Over longer periods however we can get it badly wrong. In the early 1950s an IBM executive reportedly said that he thinks the world-wide commercial market for computers would be less than 100! When the Laser was invented people had a feeling that this might be useful one day but they had no idea just how overwhelmingly useful it would turn out to be. Although they lack the fanfare of big space projects and the like material science and nano technology make steady progress and quietly advance our lives in many corners.
Economists are people who make predictions all the time only to revise those predictions shortly after. They are really decent people using honest mathematics but while a natural disaster can unexpectedly affect the economy it's usually the fact that economic behaviour is dominated by the human psyche and to predict that is a real challenge.
But when it comes to predicting the future the unrivalled number one spot by a large margin easily goes to astrophysicists and cosmologists. Although many details still need to be filled in they seem to have a good idea about our past until shortly before the Big Bang, they can neatly explain how the solar system formed and how it will end. They have the tremendous advantage of being able to study many sun-like stars in different stages of their life and to look back in time by looking further out into space.
Thanks to them I know that it will be another 5 billion years or so until conditions in our solar system become a little unconfortable but I don't think humans will last that long anyway. The end of the solar system is not the end of the world. For a long time after that stars will be born and die, galaxies will collide and merge etc. How it will all end (if it will end) not even cosmologists are able to tell with any certainity. We really don't know enough physics yet.
So what are my predictions for the New Year?
I firmly predict that there will be partial eclipses of the Sun on January 4, June 1, July 1 and November 25 and there will be total eclipses of the Moon on June 15 and December 10.
I expect that science in all its forms will make steady progress. We might even see something spectacular like the Higgs particle turning up but I would not bet my money on it (not this year at least). What I really hope for is some discovery which nobody had expected as this usually advances science the most.
I further predict that predictions by economists continue to be off the mark and with a certainity similar to my eclipse predictions I can even forecast a disaster of national proportions: Exactly a year from now on the next New Year's Eve the media will be full of astrology!
Have a Happy New Year and may all the good predictions come true for you and the pessimistic ones turn out to be wrong!
It's New Year's Eve and if you ever thought of Germany as a country with rationally thinking citizens you better stay away from here on this day as astrology rules supreme in the media. Never mind the many studies that have clearly shown that astrology is nothing but humbug come this time of the year and the faces of astrologers are everywhere. And most of them seem to earn more money than I ever had.
Ironically, astrology has helped us to better predict the future: Because emperors and kings in centuries past firmly believed in it they became major sponsors of people studying the stars and thus the likes of Kepler had the means for their investigations and could advance the cause of astronomy. Thanks to astronomy I can solidly predict that four days from now on 4-JAN-2011 the sun will rise partially eclipsed and that at 9:18 local time a maximum eclipse of 70% will be visible from my place.
Actually, this prediction is uncertain. Not the astronomy part mind you but the visibility statement. Whether I can actually see this eclipse will depend on the weather and predicting that is much less certain. The atmosphere as we now know is a chaotic system which puts meteorologists at a clear disadvantage compared to astronomers (even though some bodies in the otherwise so orderly solar system do exhibit chaotic motion).
Yet weather predictions over a few days have become quite reliable. So I can expect the upcoming Tuesday morning to be mostly cloudy and there go my chances of seeing the solar eclipse. My only (not at all unrealistic) hope is that this prediction turns out to be wrong.
Over longer periods however weather reports break down. Nobody can tell me at the moment whether there will be thunderstorms on July 18 at the place where I live. But there is a high probability that this day will be warmer than today as this is right in the middle of summer. And should you travel to India at about that time you can expect monsoon rains.
Climate models have become more advanced in recent years to allow reasonable predictions that the upcoming summer can be expected to be warmer or wetter than usual in a particular region. But predicting exactly how the climate will change over the next few decades is not that straightforward as man himself gets into the loop. With the climate being affected ever more by the activities of mankind it's political decisions as well as nature that will decide how the climate will evolve. Climate models can predict the consequences of those political decisions and hopefully guide us in making the right ones but politics isn't always done with scientific reasoning.
While meteorologists and climatologists can make reasonable predictions over short time spans but fail over longer periods it's the other way around for geologists. Nobody can tell for sure whether a major earthquake will hit tomorrow but over the proverbial geologic timescales something can be said about how the surface of the Earth will change.
Understanding the geologic forces at work geologists have been able to piece together the past history of our globe and with the help of plate tectonics can come up with predictions of how the contintents will split apart and collide to form new continents and mountains etc. tens or hundreds of millions of years from now.
Biologists are not quite as lucky. Although we seem to have a sound understanding how life evolved on this planet any predictions on the future of life on Earth seem to be fraud. Will there still be a homo sapiens 10 million years from now or how will our species have evolved? Will we have used bio-engineering to come up with humans that are custom-made for colonizing planet Mars?
If biologists do any predictions at all they tend to be of a gloomy sort like how many species are expected to die out over the next decade due to the encroachment of man. We are normally more upbeat about our technological future. This often leads to underestimating the many little problems of putting great ideas into practise.
The ISS is way behind its original schedule and the LHC hasn't particularly been on time either. I'm still waiting to be able to navigate with the European Galileo system etc. Yet while delays seem to be the rule rather than the exception with big projects predictions of how our technological world will evolve over the next decade or two are usually not too far off. After all there actually is an ISS and LHC in place right now!
Over longer periods however we can get it badly wrong. In the early 1950s an IBM executive reportedly said that he thinks the world-wide commercial market for computers would be less than 100! When the Laser was invented people had a feeling that this might be useful one day but they had no idea just how overwhelmingly useful it would turn out to be. Although they lack the fanfare of big space projects and the like material science and nano technology make steady progress and quietly advance our lives in many corners.
Economists are people who make predictions all the time only to revise those predictions shortly after. They are really decent people using honest mathematics but while a natural disaster can unexpectedly affect the economy it's usually the fact that economic behaviour is dominated by the human psyche and to predict that is a real challenge.
But when it comes to predicting the future the unrivalled number one spot by a large margin easily goes to astrophysicists and cosmologists. Although many details still need to be filled in they seem to have a good idea about our past until shortly before the Big Bang, they can neatly explain how the solar system formed and how it will end. They have the tremendous advantage of being able to study many sun-like stars in different stages of their life and to look back in time by looking further out into space.
Thanks to them I know that it will be another 5 billion years or so until conditions in our solar system become a little unconfortable but I don't think humans will last that long anyway. The end of the solar system is not the end of the world. For a long time after that stars will be born and die, galaxies will collide and merge etc. How it will all end (if it will end) not even cosmologists are able to tell with any certainity. We really don't know enough physics yet.
So what are my predictions for the New Year?
I firmly predict that there will be partial eclipses of the Sun on January 4, June 1, July 1 and November 25 and there will be total eclipses of the Moon on June 15 and December 10.
I expect that science in all its forms will make steady progress. We might even see something spectacular like the Higgs particle turning up but I would not bet my money on it (not this year at least). What I really hope for is some discovery which nobody had expected as this usually advances science the most.
I further predict that predictions by economists continue to be off the mark and with a certainity similar to my eclipse predictions I can even forecast a disaster of national proportions: Exactly a year from now on the next New Year's Eve the media will be full of astrology!
Have a Happy New Year and may all the good predictions come true for you and the pessimistic ones turn out to be wrong!
There has been a prediction, based on extrapolation of the steadily decreasing size of the smallest known exoplanets up to now, that an Earth-sized at just the right distance from its sun would be discovered this year, around May, if memory serves.
This of course applies only if the discovery of Gliese 581g is not confirmed - though that was still a bit on the large side and its central star a bit too unstable for comfort.