Future tense
"NIELS BOHR WAS a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to our understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics, eventually earning him the Nobel Prize in Physics.
He also had a dry wit: "Prediction is very difficult," he once said, "especially about the future."
Yet, predicting the future wasn't a problem for most of human history: 100,000 years ago, life in the savannahs of Africa didn't change much from century to century.
In Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece and even the Middle Ages, life was largely unchanging, occasionally upset by war, the toppling of a monarch or pestilence and natural disaster.
It's only since the Industrial Revolution that the future has been highly unpredictable. The march of science and technology has a way of tripping us up, surprising us, and changing our societies before our very eyes."
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