Is the future of humanity fixed?

The belief that scientific laws can predict the future has been shaken by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, so it’s better to think of the future as something that can change based on our actions, not something that is set in stone.

 

Most people have thought about time travel at some point in their childhood. “I’d love to go back in time and see dinosaurs for real,” or “I wonder how people will live in the future. But as we grow up, we grow out of our childhood fantasies and focus on the real world. But even as we focus on the present, the future never leaves our minds. Whether it is far or near, we are thinking about the future, preparing for the present, and running toward the future. But what if the road to that future is a lonely one? In other words, are we running toward a predetermined future?
Since Newtonian mechanics, scientists have thought that the world moves according to scientific laws. This means that if we know all the scientific laws that exist in the world, we can predict the future. For example, suppose you hold a ball in the air and then release it. What will happen to the ball? Most people would say that it would fall down without looking. This is because we know the law of gravity, which states that the Earth pulls on the ball, and the law of acceleration, which states that when an object is subjected to a force, it moves in that direction, and when we apply these laws to the ball, we know it will head down. In this way, the world is driven by a number of scientific laws, and once we know them, we can apply them to predict the next movement. Since the Industrial Revolution, science and technology have been advancing at a rapid pace, uncovering the scientific laws of many phenomena. We are even learning more and more about how the neurons in our brains work and how the nervous system works. This indicates that we are not far away from discovering scientific laws for human emotions and behavior. This idea of “discovering the laws of science will reveal the future” dominated people’s thinking until the 20th century.
However, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, published in 1927, began to shake people’s belief in such scientific laws. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that all objects do not behave according to scientific laws, but have errors, which are expressed as probabilities. The error is so small that for a localized part, we can predict the next movement by applying the scientific laws we know, but for the future, which is a long time in the future or a large area, the error is a large variable, and the next movement cannot be considered fixed. In this way, predicting the future seems to be an eternal labyrinth. Unless we can prove the indeterminacy principle wrong in the future or discover a law that expresses it precisely.
The reason we care so much about the future is because our lives are so closely tied to it. If we can know the future, we can prepare for it, or if it’s not what we want, we try to change it. This vague anxiety about the future is what drives our interest in the future. So, what if we treated the future differently, instead of trying to predict it? In the movie Minority Report, Agatha (Samantha Morton) says to John Anderton (Tom Cruise), “There’s still a chance, I’ve seen the future.
“You still have a chance, you’ve seen the future, you can change it!”
Also, in the final scene, John Anderton (Tom Cruise) says to Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow).
“Kill me. As was prophesied. Only one thing, you know the future, and you can change it if you want.”
In the movie above, Agatha is a psychic who can predict the future, and John is a cop who uses her predictions to prevent crime. When John learns of a future in which he will commit a murder, he runs away and tries to stop himself from committing the crime, but the murder does happen. In the final part, Lamar Virgeth decides to kill John for revealing his secret, and Agatha foresees this, but in the end, Lamar Virgeth kills himself and John is spared. So what’s the lesson here? The future that the psychic foresees is thought to be set in stone, so the foreknowledge is used to prevent crime, and John tries to avoid it, but in the end it happens. However, the final scene of the movie shows that the predicted future does not happen. I think it tells us that it is not our future that is determined, but our thoughts. By looking at the future, our thoughts are captivated by it, and we don’t prepare for the present, but instead, like a child being punished, we worry about the future. Besides, the future is not determined (according to current scientific theories), so seeing the future does not help us. If you know the future in advance, and you know when something bad will happen, and you try to prepare for it in advance, but the future turns out to be worse than the future, won’t you be devastated? It’s like knowing is the disease and not knowing is the medicine. Therefore, isn’t it much easier to think of the future as something we don’t need to know, and to think of the future as a future that is always new to us and changes according to our actions? I think it’s a happy life to live with the expectation that something good will happen tomorrow. If we freak out about a future that hasn’t happened, that happy tomorrow will never come.