The Future

 

Que sera, sera

Que sera, sera,
Whatever will be, will be.
The future's not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.

Is the future random? 

Remember Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper? The Ant works and stores food for the winter.  The Grasshopper plays, does not store food for the winter, and then as winter approaches has to beg the Ant for food. The Ant knows that winter comes every year.  He can’t do anything to prevent winter, but he knows that  it happens and prepares for it.  The Grasshopper acts as if the summer will continue forever.

The fable has been used to promote such divergent views as Industrialist versus Artist;  Greed versus Charity; etc.  The fable is ambivalent.  It can be summed up as “s*** happens, deal with it.” The Ant knew that winter was coming, because he saw the pattern that winter comes every year and he prepared to deal with it.  He was not a prepper or cultist who was preparing for some doomsday that might not happen. 

Hurricanes happen and while the exact landfall is not known, science can and does outline a probable path for the storm.  And that path of probability is important.  While you can not alter that path of probability with a Sharpie, it does provide warnings to residents in that cone of probability.  While the hurricane’s path is random, it does follow known laws, and while we cannot say where the hurricane will land, we can say where it will NOT land.

Science can not predict the future with certainty.  But science can assign probabilities to a future given certain starting points and actions along the way. The gold standard of science, 5 Sigma, Standard Deviations, is still only 99.99994% certain.  The idiots who won’t accept anything but 100% certainty attack the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of Relativity because they are “only a Theory”, i.e. are less than 100% certain.   Newton's “Law” of Gravity was corrected by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.  Science has evolved such that Laws and certainty are understood to be unattainable mirages.

While we can’t predict a definite future, we can say what futures are not possible. The future may not yet be written, but believing that there is a future is why old men plant trees that will not mature until after they die, and why medieval  Cathedrals took hundreds of years to build.  Unless the first stone is laid in that Cathedral, it will never get built.  And the stones are not placed haphazardly. There is a plan to where the first, second, etc. stones should be placed.  We may not know what the future is, but we know what the future will not be, and maybe that will have to be good enough. 

We can’t change the impossible.  But many things are only improbable.  We can change the improbable. We may not be able to see the future.  But we can see what the future will NOT be, and hopefully that knowledge can be useful.