ONE FORECAST SURE TO COME TRUE.

Because the calendar ticks over (but also because many of the usual sources of news shut down for the holidays), columnists’ thoughts around the New Year tend to turn to the future and prediction. You may have seen the Toronto Star’s recent reprinting of a 1983 prophecy for 2019 that it had commissioned from Isaac Asimov, the science and science fiction writer, 35 years ago.

The editors who ran the piece on Dec. 31, 1983, chose 2019 because it was about the same distance away from 1984 as 1984 was from 1948, the year George Orwell published his futurist-realist novel Nineteen Eighty-four about life under Soviet-style totalitarianism. In the same vein, Jill Lepore, the amazingly prolific Harvard historian, wrote recently in the New Yorker about Toward the Year 2018, a book of forecasts by leading scientists and social commentators of 1968. If you want a different New Yorker take on the same study, Paul Collins commented on it Jan. 1, 2018.

(Lepore, whose latest book is These Truths: A History of the United States, has said that people who point out how much she writes actually mean she writes a lot for a woman. No: what we mean, enviously, is that she writes a lot for a human being.)

“Prophecy is a mug’s game,” Lepore begins her piece, and she goes on: “It’s bad manners to look at past predictions to see if they’ve come true.”

If so, it’s good so many of us have bad manners because that’s what makes these reviews of past predictions such fun. And such use.

How little they foresaw, how silly they were, even the smartest thinkers around, is the basic theme of all such pieces — and should be. Asimov, for instance, wrote in his Star piece that by 2019 “we would be back on the moon in force,” not just Americans but “an international force of some size; and not to collect moon rocks only, but to establish a mining station that will process moon soil and take it to places in space where it can be smelted into metals, ceramics, glass and concrete — construction materials for the large structures that will be put in orbit about the Earth.” Such structures, Asimov predicted, would include one that beams solar energy down to Earth and thus alleviates future energy problems. That may all happen one day, and maybe it would have happened if space momentum built up in the 1960s had been maintained. But it wasn’t, so we won’t see moon industries in 2019.

Asimov thought big infrastructure of the kind he envisioned would bring world government. We do have lots of international forums and meetings these days, and much co-operation. But we’re a long way from world government and, if anything, getting farther from it by the minute. Which many of us who like our nation-states are just fine with.

(Incidentally, the editor who commissioned the piece says Asimov was paid $1 a word in 1984, which would be $6.95 a word today. If only more forecasters had warned of currency debasement!)

Lepore is pretty balanced in her assessment of the 1968 forecasts she reviews. Everyone got it that computers were coming and would have a big effect, although they couldn’t have and didn’t get many of the details right. (Who in 1968 imagined people today would wander the streets, heads bowed like monks, monitoring their world via hand-held phones?) She praises MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool for having realized computerization would bring privacy dilemmas. That’s interesting because, in his year-earlier piece, Paul Collins called out Sola Pool for wrongly predicting nations would calmly choose their favoured “levels of employment, of industrialization, of increase in GNP.” You win some, you lose some.

What do we take from these annual prophecy fests? They’re like blindfolded dart throwing. Some darts inevitably hit. Some 1968 predictions did turn out right. But so what? That would have been useful knowledge only had we known in 1968 which dart-throwers were going to be accurate. But we didn’t. That we do now isn’t much use. Do we go back to those who did foresee correctly and ask them about the next 50 years? Unfortunately only one of the prognosticators of Toward the Year 2018 is still alive (at 89). And would we really have confidence he would be right again? Correct in the past means correct for the future is the usual sales pitch of stock pickers. But do we want to apply that rule to real life?

These exercises are like watching Theresa May dance. Smart, famous people make fools of themselves, though with predictions it’s at some remove in time.

But our presumption seems to be, looking back, that now somehow we’re all smarter and more prescient and wouldn’t have made such mistakes.

But we aren’t smarter and more prescient. And we never will be. (How many people have ever been as smart as Isaac Asimov?)

So my own prophecy, in which I have great confidence, is that far-future prophesying will continue. And that most of the prophets will end up hilariously wrong.

I will accept any congratulations by telepathy starting Jan. 1, 2069.

THESE EXERCISES ARE LIKE WATCHING THERESA MAY DANCE.