Only fools..

CONFUCIUS SAID  "only fools predict the future."  Thus must we all be fools, for verily predicting the future is as innately human as remembering the past. We seem incapable of living contentedly only in the present moment.

Science fiction writers are among the most entertaining, and often illuminating prognosticators. Jules Verne, in the eighteen nineties,  predicted under the sea and up in the air travel. H.G. Wells, also late in the nineteenth century, predicted space travel. Arthur C. Clarke predicted orbiting satellites. Isaac Asimov predicted computers.

Sometimes their misses are as revealing as their hits. Most science fiction writers of the middle twentieth century predicted that by the second decade of the twenty first century humans would be travelling regularly back and forth between earth and colonies on the moon and mars. Oh well.

Nobody got personal computers right. Writers foresaw powerful computers, but not in personal houses. Always they were located in science laboratories, or government instututions. They missed out on cell phones too. IN many a riveting sci fi novel, someone lands in a space ship, hops into a flying automoblie which is self driven, and goes looking for a phone booth.

One of the most widely read science fiction writers going today, Ben Bova, has fallen victim. His books written in the early nineteen nineties talk about the "soviet union" in the twenty first century, and he has astronauts exploring the surface of mars, and taking pictures - and running out of film.

Still on the surface on mars in the mid twenty first century, Bova's explorers rush back to their spaceship, log onto their computer, and insert a floppy disk.

So maybe we're not fools for trying to predict the future and write about it, as long as we keep our feet on the ground long enough to remember that what we predict is almost certain to be wrong.

Bb

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