Nobody knew that ... is the favorite excuse for the ignorant.
As science developed better and better tools for prediction have been developed. we can only see how weather predictions have improved over the last years. There are of course many events that until now have avoided predictability, one, of course, is earthquakes. Let us be clear if someone says that there is going to be an earthquake next week, s/he will be right because there are always earthquakes around the world so in this case predictability requires more information. In order to predict an earthquake we must say where, when, and how strong.
Thus we see a dichotomy with short term, narrow predictions, and long term complex phenomena. Engineering has been an excellent tool for "short term" analysis and predictions, so we can get in our car and drive worry less knowing how much gas we have and the information that our car is running without the check engine light. With other areas like accounting, we can do similar things. We can predict how long will it take for our bank account to be in the black taking by knowing how much money it has now and what the rate of expenses is. Predictability is possible when we know all the factors involved.
The development of the internet in the 90s brought many uncharted situations that have changed the way we live. Now at this moment, I am typing to a "cloud" that would be unthinkable a few years ago. Typing with type correcting assistant and spelling check making things easier in many ways. In the 70s a film featuring, at the time well-know actors Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, tried to predict the future. The movie "Soilent Green" hit the screens in 1973 telling the "story" of New York in 2022. If you watch the movie, some predictions based on human nature, like greed and income inequality were accurate, but the technological predictions were completely out of the target. There are self-fulfilling prophecies and prophecies that produce the opposite outcome. In the movie, it was predicted that by 2022 New York City will have more than 40 million inhabitants, so what happened with this prediction? The well thought prediction was based on the statistical trend of growth of the city based on how many people were, in the 70s, moving to NYC. One pausable explanation is that as people saw the movie and more and more people were getting conscious about the environment and city population growth they decided not to move to NY. The 70s was a decade of environmental awakening, some would say started by authors like Rachel Carson and his book "Silent Spring" when many laws passed the US congress protecting the environment like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.
As we increase the number and the degree and uncertainty of factors in a process or phenomena the statical chance that we would be able to predict diminishes. That has been the case with predicting the weather. One important factor in our knowledge of a situation or phenomenon is its historical background. Weather predictions were in the past mainly based on historical information about the climate which is the average over years of the weather in a place. Climate seasons are statistical representations of historical data.
Today in 2020 we are witnessing forest fires on the west coast of the USA, fires that have no recent parallel. So people are saying nobody knew that this could happen. But, of course, environmentalists have been, for many years, warning about climate change and its effects on wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, floods, and other natural phenomena that transform into human-made disasters.
Many with knowledge started to warn us about the possibility of a worldwide pandemic several years ago. Bill Gates had a Ted Talk in 2015 (click here for the talk), and Fareed Zakaria in his GPS program (June 25, 2017) on CNN dedicated a segment to criticize the reduction on the CDC budget by the Trump administration by pointing out that a pandemic likely and we needed to be prepared. Not believing in science has dire consequences, and having leaders with power in our society that are ignorant is dangerous and catastrophic.
The question remains about how can we predict the future and what does it mean to predict the future. There are, for sure, many events, like earthquakes, that can't be predicted but nevertheless, we can prepare just in case. We can have earthquake-resistant buildings, dams, bridges, and general infrastructure but we have to pay the price.
