Plotting Fallout
I spent some time in the Army training as an NBC officer. No, that's not the TV network, even though I was born in Hollywood. NBC is one of a zillion acronyms meaning Nuclear, Chemical, Biological. You know, weapons of Mass Destruction. Little did I realize how quickly we could kill off almost every living thing except Cockroaches. The nuclear bombs we had when I was in the army back in the 70's were many times more powerful than those that were dropped on Japan. And we had a lot more than 2 of them. No place was safe. I used to look at maps of the world and especially the US thinking of where I would go to hide if the bombs started falling. Forget about it. Living in North Dakota seemed like a great remote place, except for the fact that in those days, it was missile central. Probably still is, and I live there now; I never would have predicted that.
One of my jobs as an NBC officer was to plot radioactive fallout on topographical maps of the war zone. This information would then be used to steer personnel around the affected nuclear zones, at least I hoped so. We had charts and formulas and special protractors all designed to calculate the future direction, speed and amount of fallout that would occur after the blast, and how long it would last. I quickly realized that there was almost no point in making all the calculations, if just a handful of bombs of sufficient size were used, the entire battlefield would be a "HotZone", a ghostly gray hell colored only by the signs of NBC teams that were placed at the edges of the zone, with the bright, glaring warning sign for Radioactive danger. Real Estate sales inside the zone would be setback for some time.
But predict the future we did. I thought it was finally a practical use of some of those math classes I took in high school. I actually enjoyed mapping out the future of an ecological disaster, imagining what the land would look like from hilltop to crater depths, to rivers that spilled into lifeless lakes. You feel like you are plotting courses on a map of a great ocean, vast and unknown, ready to make sail into the future.
I look back on it all with a nod of futility. It's not that I'm genetically cynical about such things, I just think predicting the future is a lot less accurate than I have been led to believe. In the stunning book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb skewers the teams of futurists that inhabit the planet from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. There are so many people predicting so many things today that one can safely predict it might get worse before it gets better. Just spend some time with the Global Warming crowd. Prediction heaven or hell, either way.
Taleb turns the future into the real guessing game that it is and offers a smarter course than prediction, that of preparation. One can have more success preparing their future than they can predicting it. One of his main ideas is simple, there are going to come along crazy, maybe extreme events like 9/11 or the Internet that are going to change everything in huge leaps and sweeps. No one really knew what those two events were going to mean to the world, much less that they were coming. But like an unusual, out of nowhere Black Swan(you probably haven't seen any Black Swans, there all White, Right?, well no, there are some black ones, I've seen em myself) these events have utterly changed the world we live in. Just try to get on an airplane today. Or have someone stay at your home while your wifi is down and they want access to use their Mactop.
No, predicting the future is fun as well as fools fun. Yes, you can make some predictions and some can come true, but you can't predict the Black Swans, and they are the futures biggest engines. That is probably why I scoff and chuckle when I hear about the myriad projections for the future of Christianity or churches or religion. Some think church going is on the ropes. I can see it has been going through a rough period. Some think America is going to go the way of Europe, where cathedrals now house railway stations or art galleries, or museums where you have to pay to get in to see what faith was like 500 years ago. Some think Africa and South American are the centers of Christianity now. And with all these facts and figures plugged into the predictions about the future, we come up with grand visions, warnings, and movements to try and turn the tide in favor of keeping things as they were or recently have been. We try so hard to make the future look like the past, but we use our White Swans to make sense of it all, forgetting about the Black ones which can't be known anyhow.
I don't know about all that. I tend to like predicting the future, or at least benefiting from those who do. It helps me think about where I want to be in a few years. But I know that there will be events in the future that will be beyond our predictive ability. They will change and rock our world but they will not rock or change our God. I'm starting to think I should leave tomorrow to God, He alone has it figured out. He has given today away to me as a gift. Plotting tomorrow's fallout may be intriguing, but living life today is my privilege.
One of my jobs as an NBC officer was to plot radioactive fallout on topographical maps of the war zone. This information would then be used to steer personnel around the affected nuclear zones, at least I hoped so. We had charts and formulas and special protractors all designed to calculate the future direction, speed and amount of fallout that would occur after the blast, and how long it would last. I quickly realized that there was almost no point in making all the calculations, if just a handful of bombs of sufficient size were used, the entire battlefield would be a "HotZone", a ghostly gray hell colored only by the signs of NBC teams that were placed at the edges of the zone, with the bright, glaring warning sign for Radioactive danger. Real Estate sales inside the zone would be setback for some time.
But predict the future we did. I thought it was finally a practical use of some of those math classes I took in high school. I actually enjoyed mapping out the future of an ecological disaster, imagining what the land would look like from hilltop to crater depths, to rivers that spilled into lifeless lakes. You feel like you are plotting courses on a map of a great ocean, vast and unknown, ready to make sail into the future.
I look back on it all with a nod of futility. It's not that I'm genetically cynical about such things, I just think predicting the future is a lot less accurate than I have been led to believe. In the stunning book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb skewers the teams of futurists that inhabit the planet from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. There are so many people predicting so many things today that one can safely predict it might get worse before it gets better. Just spend some time with the Global Warming crowd. Prediction heaven or hell, either way.
Taleb turns the future into the real guessing game that it is and offers a smarter course than prediction, that of preparation. One can have more success preparing their future than they can predicting it. One of his main ideas is simple, there are going to come along crazy, maybe extreme events like 9/11 or the Internet that are going to change everything in huge leaps and sweeps. No one really knew what those two events were going to mean to the world, much less that they were coming. But like an unusual, out of nowhere Black Swan(you probably haven't seen any Black Swans, there all White, Right?, well no, there are some black ones, I've seen em myself) these events have utterly changed the world we live in. Just try to get on an airplane today. Or have someone stay at your home while your wifi is down and they want access to use their Mactop.
No, predicting the future is fun as well as fools fun. Yes, you can make some predictions and some can come true, but you can't predict the Black Swans, and they are the futures biggest engines. That is probably why I scoff and chuckle when I hear about the myriad projections for the future of Christianity or churches or religion. Some think church going is on the ropes. I can see it has been going through a rough period. Some think America is going to go the way of Europe, where cathedrals now house railway stations or art galleries, or museums where you have to pay to get in to see what faith was like 500 years ago. Some think Africa and South American are the centers of Christianity now. And with all these facts and figures plugged into the predictions about the future, we come up with grand visions, warnings, and movements to try and turn the tide in favor of keeping things as they were or recently have been. We try so hard to make the future look like the past, but we use our White Swans to make sense of it all, forgetting about the Black ones which can't be known anyhow.
I don't know about all that. I tend to like predicting the future, or at least benefiting from those who do. It helps me think about where I want to be in a few years. But I know that there will be events in the future that will be beyond our predictive ability. They will change and rock our world but they will not rock or change our God. I'm starting to think I should leave tomorrow to God, He alone has it figured out. He has given today away to me as a gift. Plotting tomorrow's fallout may be intriguing, but living life today is my privilege.
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