The future

Much of human experience now has to do with predicting the future. For some it is becoming an obsession. Take television. Count the number of shows out there that talk about the coming apocalypse.

So now we get our weekly fare of “Doomsday Preppers.” Which makes us immediately wonder: Is it high time to buy a gun? A semi-automatic would be nice. A shotgun is more effective to bring down a zombie,  a machine gun for a whole horde of them. Then if not zombies, why not a worldwide economic collapse? Why not an alien invasion or a meteor? All the more more reason to stock up on guns and ammo.

Another take on Nostradamus is regular television fare. They are admittedly fun to watch if only to give us something to say the next time we share a round with the boys. They bring the idea of collective inescapable death to a point of absurdity. And it all seems funny until they put in another extended clip of 9/11, the two buildings issuing forth those familiar twin billows of smoke before falling in a mushroom cloud of debris. The iconic image makes us forget there are over a thousand people falling along with all that steel, concrete and bond paper.

But such is the nature of television. If it ever allows us to forget, it makes us forget only certain things. And as we once again confront the vision of those twin buildings burning away for a short few fractions of seconds, we know and indeed we foretell how it is going to fall. We forget that when it actually happened that fall was an absolute shocking surprise. Who could have guessed it?

Only those who perpetrated the event itself. They knew its dynamics of cause and effect. Crash the plane here. Make sure its fuel tanks are full. This is the building structure. This is the format of statistical probabilities. This much chance this thing will happen. And they might have consulted an academic to predict the total number of deaths, or a sociologist to assess its socio-political impact. How and within what time horizon it would change the world. And how many guns would now have to be made and bought because of it.

The modern age has made prophets of all of us in a manner not much dissimilar from prophets of old. Except for the fact that we have numbers now and statistics where the ancients just simply relied on their Gods. The numbers unlike humans never lie. It is not in their nature to. They can only be mistaken or read erroneously.

All these tell us that while things have become different  they remain still more or less the same. Now as in the time of the ancients, we still feel the need to be able to say if only to ourselves: This thing will happen. And so it is good time to do this.

Like Noah building his ark while all his neighbors laughed. They laughed all the way  until the rains fell and water started started climbing up their doorsteps. What did they think then? Well, if they were engineers, they may  have calculated the amount of water that could  bring the tide up to their rooves. And they might have said to themselves: Impossible!

You can be sure a statistician would approach the problem entirely differently. The religious might go and bring out the ancient texts if only to see whether it might tell them what to do next. Whichever way, they will all know when the time has come to swim for it. But where they swim to? Well, if they’ve kept abreast with what’s on television, the answer is easy: Pack up your arms and take over the ark! And thank the networks we have enough firepower to get the job done.

Now, as in the time of the ancients, we are doomed as ever before. But those with a true gift of prophecy know there is only one way to go. The future can go as bleak as it wants. But this day is good. Enjoy!