Predicting the future from the past.

Introduction Like everyone else I am getting older, and I am being asked to talk more and more about the future (a coincidence?). By definition, these talks are speculative (there is no evidence for the future) and they reflect, almost exclusively, a personal view, which in turn arises from my own by definition restricted vital experiences. While preparing one of these talks, I thought that nobody would have been able to predict what was about to happen (the future) in the nearly 40 years that followed my graduation from medical school in 1979. Below I list a number of things that have occurred from then until now. To some extent, this is a sort of experiment where, knowing de facto what has occurred, we ask ourselves if we would ever have been able to predict these events (i.e. can we predict the future from the past?). I believe that this exercise illustrates well the difficulties in predicting the future, since the answer to this question is almost certainly no. The list, not meant to be exclusive or prioritised, includes several very significant advances.