• Question: Can you predict what will happen in the future?

    Asked by virtnack to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 17 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Mark Vesey

      Mark Vesey answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      No. Nobody can do that, everyone and everything influences what happens in the future. Everybody can (and often does) try to predict what will happen in many situations!

    • Photo: Luna Munoz

      Luna Munoz answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      Not with certainty, and I’m kind of glad I can’t 😉

    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 16 Mar 2011:

      No, but there are many areas where we can estimate the likelihoods (probabilities) of certain things happening. This is one of the ways that scientists are working out the possible consequences of global change. If you take computer simulations of the present day climate system, and then run them forwards in time many times over, with varying starting assumptions, you can then end up with a probability map of the chance that temperature will rise by 1K, 2K and so on.

    • Photo: Melanie Stefan

      Melanie Stefan answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      To quote Paul Gascoigne, “I have never made predictions, and never will.”

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