We were playing tennis. Well, he was playing and I was trying to. The book The Limits to Growth had recently come out, published by The Club of Rome. The authors were scientists at MIT. The book more or less predicted plenty of difficulties for humans by about the year 2025. At the time, it was the year 1972. My friend, a historian of science, said that he wanted to know more about the history of the future. He explained that he meant how well humans predicted their future in the past.
Since then, I feel I have learned that the answer is "Poorly". With political speech flying all over just now, I see that we don't know much about what the future will be like but there are many signs that there will be problems. Water shortages, increasing heat from the sun, increasing crime, over-popluation are some problems that seem likely.
That morning at the tennis courts led the two of us to go through the steps to launch a course. We called it "Futures" and added a faculty member to our effort - a man from our College of Natural Resources. We didn't know what the future would bring. We couldn't teach students what their future would be. The course was run for several years. I don't think we counted carefully but many of the students who elected to enroll were from that College of Natural Resources.
We have different amounts of knowledge about the future of this or that. People who have expertise and experience in an area, such as problems of agriculture, or crime prevention or population growth or shrinkage often make predictions, some more or less guesses and some based on knowledge. You can see some of what I have written about this topic before here: t.ly/9sXYe
