I just find it funny how someone who is so well versed in physical phenomena would take such a Laplacian stance by forecasting events some 18 years into the future. Do you not recall Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?
Well, technically, what matters is not quantum mechanics (the complementarity is not relevant actually), but Poincare’s chaos even in local deterministic dynamical systems. (see my name).
But it is a myth that in chaotic nonlinear systems that “nothing’ can be predicted. That isn’t so. There are certain facts—specific individual orbits of degrees of freedom—which can indeed be long-term unpredictable from initial conditions, and yet the attractor, the geometrical set of possible patterns, maybe can be predicted over parametric changes. This is the difference between weather and climate and why climate prediction for centuries is not a patently impossible thing to do. Conservation laws and fundamental physics controlling boundary conditions don’t stop working even with chaos.
This is why my ‘social’ predictions are based on only very long-term fundamental external constraints which will happen regardless of the chaotic nature of politics and mankind. Who knows will be elected? Who knows who will be overthrown? Who knows who gets nice in their old age and who turns into a megalomaniac tyrant? I won’t predict tomorrow’s dow either.
Peak Oil and global warming are undoubtably going to happen and make things worse no matter what we or any of the 6 billion people on the planet wish or do about it (but we can change the severity of climate and of peak oil response) And objectively they are starting to bite, both of them, exactly right now. And chaos will be consequence of them, but these processes are NOT chaotic—they are external slow changes in flux.
And, both of them are based on global physical fact. This really does matter.
