The Ten Best Long-Term Predictions in History

Above: Ugo Bardi uses highly sophisticated forecasting techniques. 

Prophecies often have a bad fame of ending in failure, as I described in a previous post, where I listed ten of the worst predictions in history. Here, I try to do the opposite: dealing with successful predictions. In working on this post, I must say that it was not easy to put together 10 really successful predictions. History is full of false prophets, poor forecasters, dumb extrapolators, disastrous meddlers with computer codes, and more. Really good, long-term predictions are extremely rare. The seers of old and the forecasters of our times faced, and still face, the same problem: if there exists such a thing as "the future" it is something we cannot make experiments with. Maybe the Gods see something we cannot see, but if they do, they don't share their knowledge with us.

So, here is the list of the best prophecies I could find. Some are less than impressive, I know, but that's how things stand. Maybe, the secret of prophecy is not trying to predict the future, but being prepared for it.


1. Seneca and collapse. Around 60 AD, the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 AD-65 AD) wrote that "Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." As a prediction, it was somewhat generic, but there is no doubt that it turned out to be correct many times in history. It held true also for Seneca himself, who was struck at the height of a brilliant career when his former pupil, Emperor Nero, ordered him to commit suicide, charged with treason. Much later, Seneca's observation was turned into a mathematical theory by Ugo Bardi who dubbed it the "Seneca Effect" and there is no doubt that it may be applied to a variety of cases.

2. Yeshua ben Hananiah and the fall of Jerusalem. Flavius Josephus (37 AD- 100 AD) wrote his “The Jewish War” some years after the fall of Jerusalem, in 70 AD. In the book, he reports about a resident of Jerusalem of the time, Yeshua ben Hanania, that,

… he every day uttered these lamentable words, as if it were his premeditated vow: “Woe, woe to Jerusalem.” Nor did he give ill words to any of those that beat him every day, nor good words to those that gave him food: but this was his reply to all men; and indeed no other than a melancholy presage of what was to come.. . Until the very time that he saw his presage in earnest fulfilled in our siege; when it ceased. For as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, “Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house.” And just as he added at the last, “Woe, woe to myself also,” there came a stone out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately. And as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost.

Yeshua was correct: Jerusalem did fall shortly after he was killed. But it must be said that for anyone who had access to the battlements, the vision of three Roman Legions camped around the city, equipped with all kinds of siege engines, must have made this a relatively easy prediction

3. Thomas Malthus and the limits to the human population. The Reverend Malthus (1766 - 1834) is well known for his "Essay on the Principle of Population" where he was the first in history to note that "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio." He then went on to predict that, in time, the growth of the British population would be stopped by famines, wars, epidemics, or a combination of these factors. The curious thing is that Malthus is often cited as an example of wrong predictions, but if you look at what he wrote, you'll notice that he never-ever said that the disaster he was seeing in the future was to take place at some specific date. Malthus was in fact prophetic because the human population did grow exponentially up to relatively recent times. How the ecosystem will intervene to put a limit to that is still to be seen, but Malthus's prophecies are in line for being possibly the most realistic ever in human history.

4. Jevons' peak coal. William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was one of the most brilliant economists in history, recognized for several key ideas in economic science. He was especially good at understanding dynamic phenomena, for instance about the fact that technological improvements leading to higher efficiency do no lead people to reduce their consumption of natural resources. That's labeled as "Jevons' paradox" but, if you think about it, you'll see that it is not a paradox at all. It is just that modern economists don't have the vision that Jevons had. About predictions, Jevons hit the jackpot with his book "The Coal Question" (1866) where he examined the limited amount of coal resources in England. On the basis of the data he had, he couldn't calculate an exact time scale, but he wrote in his book that it would happen "within a century from the present time." Indeed, coal production in England peaked around 1920. Not an exact prediction, but a relevant one that, as usual, nobody really understood. (data from Aspo Newsletter)

5. Jules Verne and the men to the Moon. Overall, the attempts of forecasting the development of new technologies fared very poorly but, in some cases, led to brilliant intuitions. One was when Arthur C. Clarke proposed orbiting satellites as telecommunications relays, already in 1945. Much earlier than that, in 1865, Jules Verne (1828 –1905) published a novel titled De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) that was perhaps the first description of a physically conceivable interplanetary travel. With his idea of a projectile shot by a long and powerful cannon, Verne was more advanced than his younger contemporary H.G. Wells, who also sent characters to the Moon, but had them use an unlikely "gravity mirror" called cavorite. Of course, in practice, it would be impossible to shoot people to space using a cannon, as it is described in Verne's novel. But actual travel to the Moon was made possible by missiles which were first developed as weapons that could have a longer range than conventional artillery. Today, the concept of using a high-power cannon to send objects to low earth orbit is sometimes called a "Verne gun," even though it doesn't appear that it was ever used in practice.

6. Svante Arrhenius and Global Warming. Svante Arrhenius (1859 – 1927) was one of the founders of modern physical chemistry, he was awarded a Nobel prize and today his discoveries are still at the basis of many fields of chemistry. A polymath who studied also the physics of the atmosphere, he was the first, in 1896, to note the phenomenon we call today the "Greenhouse Effect." He found that the average surface temperature of the earth is about 15 C because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is called the natural greenhouse effect. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of the CO2 concentration would lead to a 5 C temperature rise. This has not happened yet, but it is remarkably close to the values predicted by modern climate models.

7. The rise of Fascism in the US. Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) published in 1935 a novel called "It can't happen here" Lewis imagined the rise of a populist figure who becomes president after fomenting fear among the citizens and then proceeds to impose fascism to the US with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. Was it really prophetic?

8. Peak Oil The American geologist Marion King Hubbert deserves the credit of having been the first to see the main trends of the 21st century, nearly 50 years before it started. In his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, he presented the figure below: a bold attempt to place the human experience with energy on a 10,000 years scale. Of course, Hubbert was overly optimistic about nuclear energy which, in reality, started declining before fossil fuels did. But, with this graphic, Hubbert had laid down the human predicament several years in advance with respect to "The Limits to Growth" (1972). Catton's "overshoot" (1980), and many others. The fossil fuel production has not yet reached its peak, but it seems very close to it, so Hubbert's prediction may have been a few decades off. Not much on a scale of 10,000 years!

9 The extermination of all the non-human creatures. In 1970, Isaac Asimov published a short story titled "2430 AD" in which he told of how the human population of Earth had expanded to occupy the whole ecological space of the planet. The story is about the killing of the last few animals kept in a zoo. This leaves Earth in 'perfection', with its fifteen trillion inhabitants, twenty billion tons of human brain, and the 'exquisite nothingness of uniformity'. We haven't arrived at this point, yet, but the trend is clearly moving in that direction, with the number of wild vertebrates halved during the past 40 years or so. If things keep moving at the current pace, we won't need to wait for 2430 to see the disappearance of all the non-human vertebrates. As for the "exquisite nothingness of uniformity," we may be quite advanced with that, too.

10. The Limits to Growth. In 1972, a group of researchers from the MIT in Boston published the results of a study that had been sponsored by the Club of Rome with the title "The Limits to Growth." It was an ambitious attempt to predict the evolution of the global economic system over a time scale of more than a century. The study became famous and was quickly rejected for having predicted something that looked impossible: economic growth worldwide would come to a halt and start an irreversible decline at some moment during the 21st century. According to the study, the most reliable data indicated that the start of the decline could occur at some moment before 2020. Today, in 2020, it looks like the prediction was even too good!


Bonus 11th prediction (perhaps the best in history!). Robert A. Heinlein and the extraterrestrial epidemic. In 1951, Robert Heinlein published a novel titled "The Puppet Masters" where he described how the Earth was invaded by a race of parasites ("slugs") from outer space who would infect and take control of humans. The presence of the parasites was detectable on the skin of the infected people, so, in order to fight the infection, the President and congress mandate a law that requires people to go naked all the time to demonstrate that they are not infected. And people happily comply! Not exactly the current situation, of course, but it does ring ominously with it.....

The ten worst predictions in history: learning from past mistakes

  Ugo Bardi experiments with new predictive methods.

This post was inspired mainly by the shock I had with the various failed attempts to predict the outcome of the Covid-19 epidemic. It was truly a sobering experience: bad predictions, clueless politicians, arrogant scientists, idiotic journalists, and more. It made me doubt of the usefulness of models in general. I think we are doing several (too many) things wrong with the way we use models and (sometimes) we trust them. I'll be discussing more on this subject in future posts, for the time being, here is a list of failed predictions that I think can teach us something.

1. Coronavirus Deaths. In 2020, the model developed in large part by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College in London was the main element that led the British government to engage in a strict "lockdown" policy to avoid the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of deaths that the model predicted as a result of the COVID-19 disease. Most European States followed suit. It is still early to evaluate how the real world followed the model but, if we look at the result proposed in the "Report n. 9", we see that the model was clearly overly pessimistic. The authors of the model defended their work saying that their prediction of doom was just one of several scenarios, which is correct, but weak as a defense. In the future, we'll be able to say if Europeans truly wrecked their economies for nothing but, for the time being, the coronavirus experience can be seen as a sobering experience on the limits of the models as predictive tools.

2. The Population Bomb. In 1968, Paul Erlich and his wife Anne wrote a book titled "The Population Bomb." To say that it was catastrophistic is a little of an understatement. It is known to have contained the sentence  In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. As we all know, that didn't happen. Instead, the 1970s ushered an era of apparent abundance in the food supply that led to a rapid increase in the human population. Yet, The Erlichs' prediction may not have been so bad, at least in qualitative terms. In reality, the current population is so large that if a new famine comes, it will cause the death of not just "hundreds of millions of people" but, likely, billions of them. You might argue that the present situation is much more dangerous in terms of risks of famines than it was half a century ago, when the world's food supply was not so critically linked to the supply of fossil fuels as it is today. This story illustrates once again how difficult it is to use models for quantitative predictions, even though they may be qualitatively good. 

3. Julian Simon's 7 billion years of prosperity. In 1994, Julian Simon wrote, "We now have in our hands in our libraries, really the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years... " (Myers, N., and Julian Simon. (1994): Scarcity or Abundance, New York: Norton.). In reality, we are reaching the limits of our capabilities of doing that just now. We may conclude that Simon was off of some 7 billion years. It was a ridiculous idea from the beginning but, at least, it shows to us that there is no limit to how wrong you can be with your predictions!

4. Too much oil. In 1999, the respectable (so to say) "Economist" magazine published a leader titled "Drowning in Oil" where it was argued that the prices of oil were going to become so low that they would damage the economy, literally "drowning it in oil." The authors went on proposing that the oil price could soon go down to 10 dollars per barrel and perhaps even to 5 dollars per barrel. Needless to say, the trend was exactly the opposite, with oil prices starting a sustained rally that took them all the way up to some 150 dollars per barrel in 2008. Curiously, oil prices did plunge, briefly, to "negative" values in 2020, but if this is what the Economist authors were thinking, they were 20 years off with their prediction! This story is just one of the many disasters that ensued when someone tried to predict the vagaries of prices, even in a not so remote future. Prices are so strictly linked to human whim and perception that it seems to be simply impossible to predict them.

5. The Great Horse Manure Crisis. It is said that, in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of horse manure.” This prediction was obviously wrong, as reported and it is often used to poke fun at those silly catastrophists. But, in reality, there is no trace in the archives of "The Times" that it was ever uttered, it is a piece of fake news.  This story illustrates that you can be wrong even with a non-existing prediction!

6. The Wargame that lost the war for Japan.  It is known that, before the start of WW2, the Japanese admiralty engaged in a series of simulation games destined to determine the possible outcome of a war against the United States. It is reported that when one of these simulations was leading to a crushing defeat for the Japanese forces, the umpires (or perhaps Admiral Yamamoto himself) ordered two Japanese carriers "refloated," so that the game ended with a Japanese victory. The story of the refloated carriers is probably a legend, at least in part, but it is true that the Japanese wouldn't have engaged in the war against the US hadn't they had some kind of evidence that they could have won. It shows how dangerous it is to trust models for systems that have a binary outcome.

7. The Peace Dividend. In the 1990s, with the Soviet Union defeated and gone, some people thought that there was no more justification for the gigantic and cumbersome military apparatus that the Western Empire (officially) maintained as a defense against Communism. So, they thought it could be dismantled and the money saved distributed to the people. That was called the "peace dividend." Alas, that idea now looks as remote as the fall of the Roman Empire. Soon, there came the 9/11 attacks and the military apparatus was beefed up even more. Those who had proposed the idea of a peace dividend never realized that nobody ever made money on peace. And, as you see, it is rarely a good idea to think that people will behave in ways that make them lose money.

8. Nibiru. The story of the planet Niburu that should impact on Earth appeared for the first time in 1995, diffused by Nancy Lieder. The first predictions said the cataclysm should have been in 2003, but the best-known prediction indicated 2012 as the fatal year, something that gained a certain notoriety and a number of followers. Of course, nothing happened in 2012, so the date of the impact has been progressively moved onward, but the whole story seems to have lost interest -- as it should have. At least, this story tells us that wrong predictions may be a lot of fun and cause little damage. 

9. The Solow-Swan model. In the 1950s, Robert Solow proposed a model for the US economy based on a simple formula that generated exponential growth. The model came to be known as the "Solow-Swan" model.  There was no term in the model that accounted for the possibility of a decline or a collapse so that it was generally interpreted by economists as implying that there were no limits to growth and that the economy could be growing forever. Today, most of the choices made by politicians and decision-makers all over the world seem to be based on this model, trying, for instance, to "restart the economy" after the SARS-Cov2 epidemic by means of stimulating more consumption. That, of course, is going to make things worse if the crisis is caused by a dearth of natural resources, as it is the case. This model shows us how you can do tremendous damage to humankind even by means of just a one-line equation.

10. The second coming (or the parusia). If you read the texts written by the early Christians, Paulus, and others, it is rather clear that they were expecting the "second coming" of Jesus Christ during their lives. That, of course, didn't happen and Christians have been waiting for this dramatic event for a long time, and they are still waiting for it, sometimes under different names such as the "rapture." We cannot exclude that one of these days we'll hear a booming voice coming from the sky telling us that "The Day of Judgement has come" -- but so far that didn't happen. So, this prediction turns out to have been wrong of at least 2000 years (so far). But Christians are still waiting for the second coming and so we can conclude that predictions with no well-defined time frame can never be disproved!

Happy new year from Cassandra

Despite all her magic spells, sometimes even Cassandra has troubles in predicting the future.

(image: painting by John Waterhouse)

Every year, during the past few years, I have been publishing a post with my predictions for the new year on my Italian blog. I think I have been rather successful in this role of mine as Cassandra, the prophetess. Sometimes, I have been surprised myself of how accurate some of my statements have been. For instance, at the beginning of 2008 I said something about a coming financial crisis and how I expected oil prices to crash (I stated that also in English, here and here). And, at the beginning of 2011, I said that I expected big troubles for the European Union (see here, in Italian). You see? I think I should be scared of what I have been doing. But, in reality, it was nothing more than common sense, good data,  and the general attitude that things never stay the same.

So, how about the coming year? I was planning to write something about what 2012 could bring but, this time, it is beyond my possibilities; I am overwhelmed. The situation is so complex, so unstable, so desperately out of control that, really, anything can happen. And most of the things that can happen are bad. War in Middle East, the breakdown of the European Union, financial collapses, the bursting up of Arctic methane, epidemics, famines, major environmental disasters..... Anything can happen, even that 2012 could be, miraculously, a quiet year.

So, all what I can say is "happy new year" to everybody and hope, just hope, that Cassandra's predicting power could make this wish true.