Q:

Fortunately, predicting the future is pretty easy. People do it all the time. Getting your prediction right is a bit harder, but honestly, does anyone really care? (c)

Q:

There was a study in 2011 called “Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air,”* in which the predictive abilities of twenty-six pundits were assessed. Predictive powers ranged from mostly right to usually wrong.*

For most people, the pleasure of reading this study was the discovery that certain individuals were not just intolerable moron

Q:

Fortunately, predicting the future is pretty easy. People do it all the time. Getting your prediction right is a bit harder, but honestly, does anyone really care? (c)

Q:

There was a study in 2011 called “Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air,”* in which the predictive abilities of twenty-six pundits were assessed. Predictive powers ranged from mostly right to usually wrong.*

For most people, the pleasure of reading this study was the discovery that certain individuals were not just intolerable morons, but statistically intolerable morons. From our perspective as pop science writers, there was an even more exciting result: Regardless of their predictive prowess, all these people still have jobs. In fact, a lot of the worst predictors were the most prominent public figures. (c)

Q:

The big discontinuous leaps, like the laser and the computer, often depend on unrelated developments in different fields. (c)

Q:

Consider this: If someone came to you two hundred years ago and asked how we might build a device to scan people’s brain patterns, would your immediate response be, “Well, first we need to trap some gas in a glass tube”? (c)

Q:

The same difficulty holds for all the technologies in this book: Whether we can build an elevator to space may depend on how good chemists get at arranging carbon atoms into little straws. Whether we can make matter that assumes any shape we tell it to may depend on how well we understand termite behavior. Whether we can build medical nanobots may depend on how well we understand origami. Or maybe none of that stuff will end up mattering in the end. There is nothing about history that necessarily had to be as it was. (c)

Q:

We now know that the ancient Greeks could create complex gear systems, but never constructed an advanced clock. The ancient Alexandrians had a rudimentary steam engine but never designed a train. The ancient Egyptians invented the folding stool four thousand years ago, but never built an IKEA. (c)

Q:

There are also people who become cynical because they thought we’d have fusion power or weekend trips to Venus by now. (c)

Q:

For all these chapters, we had to read a lot of technical books and papers and we had to talk to a lot of mildly crazy people. Some were crazier than others, and generally they were our favorites. (c)

Q:

The road to Mars may be paved with small discounts. (c)