Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (11). Luck and the Future

Both the medieval minstrels and the writer of Ecclesiastes, then, are in agreement that what happens in life, whether an individual’s life or the life of the world, has nothing to do with whatever people may deserve. But it is time to ask the question: Does the randomness of luck, with regard to individual people, mean that we cannot predict the future?

We are constantly trying to predict the future. And we are not very good about it. There are two reasons. First, our minds work in a linear fashion, while many of the important processes of the world are nonlinear. Some of these nonlinear processes are exponential. Populations are an example: they grow by doubling, not by accumulating. Human population has increased as a curve, not as a line. Debt is exponential also, because the more debt you have, the more interest you pay. The federal government will figure this out sometime, when (even if other nations keep loaning us money at current interest rates) in a few decades the government will be paying more money in interest to other countries than on anything else. Some of these nonlinear processes involve a tipping point. Adding just a little more carbon dioxide to the air does not necessarily mean that we will have just a little more global warming. If enough ice melts, reducing the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into outer space, we may begin a process by which more ice melt leads to more warming, regardless of what we do about carbon emissions. James Lovelock (in his book Gaia’s Revenge) criticizes the scientists who merely extrapolate climate change from the present into the future without considering how life itself, the plants and the bacteria, may alter climate processes.

We cannot predict the future but we can calculate overall average risks. The person who does this best is Vaclav Smil, who is a genius (speaking many languages) and who can grasp the concepts of many different fields such as science, economics, and sociology. He has calculated (in his book Global Catastrophes and Trends) the risks that humankind will face over the next few decades. For example, he calculated that the risk (from 1995 through the 9-11 attacks of 2001) of an American dying from a terrorist attack was one in ten billion per person per hour. This is a much lower risk than being killed in a car accident, which is about four in a million per person per hour. He calculated the risks of hang gliding, being killed by an asteroid collision (which is about the same as being a victim of a terrorist), etc. His point is that cumulative risks do not change rapidly; despite sensational headlines, the risks have remained about the same over recent years. Therefore, we may ask, is luck really the empress of the world?

Yes, because, as Ecclesiastes and Carmina Burana both point out, from any individual’s standpoint, fate is almost entirely unpredictable. You can reduce certain risks—by driving safely, by not smoking, by exercising—but beyond these few things, you are really not in control of your fate, and there does not appear to be any heavenly help for you. Modern science allows us to calculate risks, and the error ranges associated with them, but not to predict individual fate.