The Future Looks Nothing Like the Past

The future looks nothing like the past. Whatever has happened previously is not guaranteed to happen to morrow. There's no such thing as inductive reasoning. You cannot validly predict the future given the current state of events. What you can do is to take a good explanation, something like newton's laws, predict the evolution of a simple physical system. At the time, that's actual prediction. But why worry? Why worry about what the mountain races and the nickbostrums of the world prophecy? Well, because lots of peopleListen. And lots of people listen.