Seeing the Future - Jackson Price
Jackson Price
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Seeing the Future<br>A look at the relationship between humans and the future
Jackson Price<br>Jun 30, 2026
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Recently, I went down a rabbit hole on how to predict the future. In a lot of ways, this has always fascinated me — maybe more so now that a large part of my job is trying to forecast how many people will do “x” over a given period of time. But I don’t think I’m alone. If you’ve ever had to forecast anything, sales, headcount, the weather, you’ve probably thought about the same thing: how do I figure out what will happen?<br>The one constant across all of human history is that we have always been obsessed with seeing into the future. The tools might have changed, we use spreadsheets now in place of star charts, but the impulse is still there. Which is understandable considering the advantage it would give someone over everyone else. But on a deeper level, I think there’s a part of us that craves certainty about the future because it gives us a feeling of control in a world full of uncertainty. When you can’t know what’s coming, even a rough guess feels like something to hold onto. Our relationship with the future has changed a lot over time, and I wanted to explore that.<br>What I came away with was three distinct periods over time that can help make sense of how this relationship has evolved.<br>The Divine
Going back to the beginning of written record, there are numerous records of enlightened people who could see the future. They’re often referred to as oracles, seers, or prophets.<br>In ancient cultures, like Mesopotamia or Egypt, oracles would read the stars, the flight of birds, interpret dreams and other natural phenomena to make predictions about the future. One of the most famous examples being the Oracle at Delphi.<br>Perched on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in Greece, the Oracle was a priestess who delivered prophecies on behalf of the god Apollo. Kings and generals traveled from across the ancient world to ask her what they should do, and her answers were famously cryptic.
Camillo Miola, The Oracle (1880), J. Paul Getty Museum.<br>One of the best stories I’ve read about her involves an ancient King, Croesus of Lydia. Before going to war with the Persian Empire, he asked the Oracle what would happen if he attacked. The Oracle answered that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. Croesus took that as the sign he was looking for and marched east. And he did destroy a great empire, only it was his own. The Persians made light work of their attack and the Lydian empire soon fell, never to regain power again.<br>It’s worth noting this idea of tapping into the future spans across not only the polytheistic religions but the monotheistic religions as well. Looking across the main texts of the big three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we see numerous references to prophets. Interestingly, these three religions are called the “Abrahamic Faiths” because they all trace their origins back to the Patriarch Abraham, who is often considered one of the foundational prophets.<br>The one thing they all have in common is a divine commission. Prophets were elevated individuals who were viewed as divinely chosen, thus reinforcing the importance of seeing into the future and communicating it justly. The rest of society relied on these enlightened individuals to provide wisdom and insight.<br>The Enlightenment
In 1715, Edmond Halley published the first known accurate scientific prediction of a solar eclipse’s path. Using Isaac Newton’s newly established laws of gravity, he mapped exactly where the Moon’s shadow would sweep across England and published it out to the public.<br>It’s hard to overstate how strange this must have been at the time. Up to that point, eclipses were seen as bad omens or a supernatural signpost that disaster was coming. With no understanding of how the world actually worked, the sun vanishing out of a clear sky was probably a terrifying experience. But Halley accurately predicting the eclipse showed that a new dawn was approaching. We can use science to actually understand how the world around us works.<br>Going back to Newton, I think this was a turning point in our relationship with the future. He was beginning to lay the foundations of the idea of “classical mechanics”. Put more simply, if you know the exact starting point of something and the forces acting on it, then you can predict where it will go. It’s a turning point because you start to see the idea of: “if we can calculate where things are going, is that not seeing the future?”.<br>Pierre-Simon Laplace picked up this idea and ran with it. He described a thought experiment in which a hypothetical creature, later nicknamed Laplace’s demon, Could hold all the information of the universe in its mind. Based on classical physics, it would make sense that if you knew the position and movement of every particle in the universe, you could extrapolate the entire history of...