We are being pitched futures on a regular basis. Every commercial, each political marketing campaign, each quarterly finances is a promise or a menace about what tomorrow may appear like. And it will possibly really feel, typically, like these futures are occurring, whether or not we prefer it or not—that we’re merely alongside for the trip. But the long run hasn’t occurred but. We do, in truth, get a say, and we must always seize that voice as a lot as we probably can. But how? I’ve spent the previous eight years making over 180 episodes of a podcast in regards to the future referred to as Flash Forward. Here, in a three-part sequence, are the massive issues I’ve realized about how to consider what’s attainable for tomorrow. (This is an element 2. Read part 1, and examine again quickly for half 3.)

It’s straightforward, and usually fairly enjoyable, to snigger at previous predictions in regards to the future. In the 1905 ebook A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist, writer T. Baron Russell predicted the demise of stairs. “The plan of achieving the higher a part of a small home by climbing, whenever, a form of picket hill, coated with carpet of questionable cleanliness, will after all have been deserted,” he writes. “It is doubtful whether staircases will be built at all after the next two or three decades.” There are hundreds of listicles online full of incorrect predictions—everything from Time magazine confidently declaring that remote shopping will never succeed to The New York Times claiming that a rocket could never leave Earth’s orbit.

It’s also easy, although perhaps less fun, to feel as though we ourselves, right now, are just on the cusp of something worth predicting. And if you believe the people who get to hold microphones and make speeches, or go on podcasts, or tweet viral Tweets, we are indeed right on the edge of something revolutionary. What that revolution is changes—maybe it’s apocalypse, or the singularity, or war, or a cure for Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t really matter, exactly, which cliff we’re leaning off of. The important part is that we’re always a half-step away from whatever is on the other side.

But are we? Can we actually know if we’re in the moment of change? Some historians and philosophers argue that it is impossible to know whether future people will care about our current events, because we don’t know what happens next. Others say that no, it’s absolutely possible to know in the moment if an event is historic. “Most of us have had the experience in our own lives—unfortunately, maybe too regularly lately—where things happen in the world and we think, wow, that’s a big deal,” says Matt Connelly, a historian at Columbia and writer of the ebook The Declassification Engine. For Americans, moments just like the planes hitting the Twin Towers or the rebellion on January 6 come to thoughts. “Moments where you think to yourself pretty quickly, ‘I’m going to be telling my kids about this.’”

But these massive occasions are uncommon. And for each one in every of them there are smaller occasions that wind up being critically necessary solely in hindsight. When Van Leeuwenhoek confirmed folks the primary microscope, nobody really cared. When Boris Yeltsin picked a man named Vladmir Putin as his successor in August 1999, most people—even in Russia—didn’t suppose it will be a globally historic selection. When Alexander Graham Bell pitched his new invention, the phone, to Western Union in 1876, the corporate laughed him off and called the device “hardly more than a toy.” 

So which facet of this argument is correct? And how would one even determine that out? This is what Connelly got down to do in 2019 together with his paper referred to as “Predicting History.” 

Tracking previous predictions to see whether or not they become right is tough to do. One manner to determine how good (or dangerous) we’re at predictions could be to begin polling folks now about present occasions, after which wait 30 years and return and see if these polls had been right. But no person is doing that, Connelly says, as a result of that experiment could be unattainable to get funding for.