Can The Future Be Predicted?

I try to predict what the world will be like in the future to create a convincing background to my science fiction stories and novels. For this purpose, I research emerging technologies, economic dynamics, and changing social trends. Is it possible to predict the future in the light of the past and today? As we move from micro plan to macro plan, it becomes relatively easy to predict the future. To some extent, it is possible to predict the future of the world and societies. It is almost impossible to predict the fate of individuals and the fate of individual events.

There have been crises and significant years of economic prosperity in World Economic History. However, the world economy is growing at an average annual rate of about 3%. Population dynamics in the world and the pace of innovations are conducive to this much. This economic growth is happening almost as a necessity, regardless of the performance of individuals, companies, and even countries. A great wind of determinism had blown in the 19th century. Newtonian physics shows that the object's movements will be entirely predictable when the initial conditions are known. If so, it is possible to predict the future by looking at existing data. In the 20th century, quantum physics led to the weakening of the hand of supporters of determinism. Quantum physics showed that predicting the future in terms of bodies below a specific scale was challenging. This state of uncertainty was not caused by a lack of computational capacity or ignorance but by the nature of particles.

Aside from quantum particles, some dynamics make it challenging to predict objects on a scale that we can see with the eye. One of these dynamics is the reaction mechanisms of action. Chaotic movements can occur in markets that operate on supply and demand and operate on a relatively simple mathematical basis in this aspect. The mechanism of action and response allows complex patterns to emerge from simple mathematical components. Chaos, also known as the butterfly effect, can cause minimal random effects to trigger significant events. An example of the chaos dynamic is that the Arab Spring began when a Tunisian teenager burned himself.

What future prediction are we talking about in this surprising, chaotic world?

Urbanization is such a trend. The first apartment buildings appeared in Ancient Rome. For centuries, the migration of people from small settlements to cities continued. It's not in vain that the attractions of sci-fi novels are skyscrapers. With the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian society, people gathered primarily in villages. Then came cities, metropolises, and mega-cities. This situation has an economic basis. As people gather in urban centers, the unit cost of infrastructures such as electricity, water, and the internet decreases. Economic productivity and innovation also increase by 10% when the number of people living in settlements increases by two times, starting with villages. As the population doubles, economic prosperity rises by 10%. In the rest of the world, mega-cities offer the highest economic prosperity on average to those living in that country.

Population growth is also a steady trend throughout human history. As technological advances allow more people to feed, the human population in the world has steadily increased. This has negative consequences for other living things, such as lack of habitat and environmental pollution. Today, population growth in developed countries has almost come to a standstill. In developing countries like Turkey, population growth rates have decreased dramatically. Rapid population growth is currently unique only to the underdeveloped societies of Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. If a large amount of migration is not received from outside, the population of Turkey is expected to become stable, reaching 100 million in 2050. The world's population is also projected to become almost stationary at 10 billion on the same date.

According to the idea of historicism, which Karl Marx inherited from Hegel, civilization's development is a mandatory process independent of individuals and societies. In his analysis of capitalism, Marx suggested that this process of development would necessarily lead to communism. The communist revolution did not occur in developed countries as he thought but in relatively underdeveloped Russia. Although communism was a later order compared to capitalism, it was dissolved in 1990. In his book Singularity Is Near, Futurist Ray Kurzweil showed that historical development is mandatory and accelerates through technological trends. Although Ray Kurzweil doesn't refer to Hegel or Marx, I make the connection between them.

The agenda of that age highly influence future predictions. The hottest subjects of the 1950s, 1960s, and 70s were nuclear energy and Space Studies. Deep traces of this agenda can be seen in science fiction novels written at that time and in science fiction films shot. People thought that planetary, even interstellar travel would be possible in the 2000s when we went into space and set foot on the Moon. Nuclear power would be the star of the future. Today, we have not yet been able to perform a human-crewed flight even to the neighboring planet Mars, let alone travel to another star. Space 1999 series remained a pleasant memory. Today's favorite source of energy is not nuclear but solar energy.

False scholars who claim to predict the future have existed in the past and exist today. As with any issue, it is necessary to approach the claims made in this regard with caution. No matter how hard it is to predict the future, we can't afford to give up on this pleasurable endeavor. We have to continue our efforts to plan our future rationally and prepare a better future for our children.

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