14 July 2020

I went on a bit of an internet search today, trying to find out which brilliant psychic predicted 2020.

You know what I mean – not one who predicted that we would reach 2020, but one who predicted even a little bit of what 2020 has turned out to be.

Because, you know, if you were a psychic, and you had this amazingly incredible prediction of world turmoil, surely you’d share something like that.  Surely.

People have been predicting the end of the world probably since the beginning of when predictions first got made, so surely an event that stops the world in its tracks, seizes up international travel, kills millions of people…. that would be the sort of prediction that you could put your name to.

Surely…

But I can’t find anyone having made that sort of prediction. Apparently one psychic predicted a severe pneumonia like illness spreading across with world in 2020, so she would probably win. But she also predicted Atlantis arising out from the sea and that by 2020 women would be giving birth in gravity rigged chambers. So possibly the pneumonia like illness might have been a fluke.

Surely with all the bonafide psychics out there who put their hands up regularly to tell us what’s going to happen, whether it be lottery wins or connections with long lost relatives, surely one of them had an inkling!?? 

Googling psychic predictions that turned out to be true is interesting. Heaps of people apparently predicted Harry and Meagan leaving the royal family. The ones who predicted twin girls first up for the Sussex’s didn’t do so well. Apparently human organ transplants were predicted back in 1660, digital photography predicted in 1900, and supposedly Alec Guinness warned James Dean not to drive his new car, because if he did “by 10 o’clock next Thursday you’ll be dead”. He did, and he was. To the day.

Many things have been written about in books aren’t so much predictions as fantasies about where life will take us, but have been amazingly accurate – whether it’s iPads (or computer tablets) in “2001 A Space Odyssey”, the internet by Mark Twain in 1898 in “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904“, or the Atom bomb that was dropped fictionally by HG Wells in 1904. A large ‘unsinkable’ ship crashed into an iceberg in 1898 in a novel, 14 years before the Titanic sunk.  Oh, and apparently in Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, Jonathon Swift claimed Mars had 2 moons – 151 years before they were discovered.

And, as my nimble fingers googled away I came across predictions about where we are headed. Cleaner and quieter environment with the rise in electric and autonomous vehicles – injury and death involving road vehicles reducing to almost zero. Renewable energy. Gender equality. Self powered buildings. Invisibility cloaks. Warfare will plummet. Literacy will increase. We’ll be able to speak many languages. Computers will strengthen our brains. Organ shortages will end. Space elevators. 

Maybe Atlantis will rise out of the sea, and I’ll have to eat my words.

Give me a prediction for 2030, and we will come back to this conversation in ten years time and see how we went.

Personally, I’m predicting regular use of autonomous vehicles, mobile phones go holographic, and Harry and Meagan to have won an Oscar – despite having two sets of twins at home.

What’s your prediction?