Future Predictions Quotes

Humanity will be obsolete by 2050. This is the consensus at Google and Facebook and Twitter.

I think climate change is probably the most extreme, and it's been going on for years because it's very difficult to talk about a planetary issue like climate change and to get people who live within four-year electoral cycles to actually pay attention to something that you predict is happening way in the future.

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

Never make predictions, especially about the future.

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

It is rash to set limits to the progress of science. A man who had maintained at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that within fifty years one would fly the Atlantic in a matter of hours would have risked being certified and locked up; yet we have seen this happen, and in the circumstances I am not prepared to rule out with any confidence the possibility one day of journeys through space in vessels carrying supplies of food and oxygen to the moon and the nearer planets.

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

The CIA laid out several scenarios and said life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.

Predictions of a disappearing political center are a warning of a bleak future that we can avoid only by adhering to our nation's founding principles.

When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.

Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.

When I was young, they said in the future that you'd just take a pill and never have to eat. That will never happen.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations, and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real, but they cost $20 million. We have death rays, but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

We suspect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

On climate change, we are told that there will be a civilization-ending development in the form of massive sea level rise as soon as 2050. Anybody plan to be here in 2050? I think a few of us do, myself included.

Science fiction is not quirky anymore; we live in a futuristic world now.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

This technology will obviously become more prevalent. Who knows what will result? One thing is certain, computer technology will revolutionize the way we tell stories as much as movie film has.

I guarantee you, yoga will compete with computers, music, sports, automobiles, the drug industry. Yoga will take over the world!

If I could have a time machine, where I could go back and tell 12-year-old Melissa that someday John Schneider was going to play her ex-husband, junior high would have been so much easier. I'd have had something to go for.

Predictions are so often, so wrong ... The future is just too complicated.