We Don't Know the Future

I just heard on the news that Obama is finishing up his visit to China. The announcer described them as "the superpowers of the 21st century".

You hear this sort of thing a lot. I think it's silly. Maybe they will be. But maybe they won't. We don't know. You couldn't have predicted who would be the superpowers at the end of the 20th century by looking at the great powers of 1909 (Britain?). The term superpower didn't even come into use until after WWII.

Part of our nature as humans is having a sort of silly tendency to assume that the future will be much like the present. We can look backwards at the past and understand that lots of things changed, but our predictions for the future are surprisingly static. I'm sure people in the past would have thought it impossible that the British Empire would go away. But....it did.

In short, I wish newscasters would stop saying that about the US and China.