20 May 2015: We should worry about our future

I believe that the United States is headed for a series of major crises, which will not only threaten our stature as the world’s superpower, but will greatly damage our daily lives.  In this Blog, I will discuss why these crises are likely, their possible nature, and what we can do to lessen their impact, or possibly prevent them from occurring.
Can we predict the future?  Based on Newton's Laws of Motion (see Newton: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (English translation) and Steinbach: Classical and Quantum Mechanics-in a Nutshell), we can model aspects of the physical world with great accuracy.  For example, we can launch a spaceship with great confidence that it will reach the precise position where a distant planet will be years in the future (see NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Basics of Space Flight).  This awareness that we can explain and predict some aspects of our physical world so well led many scientists to conclude that we could also predict the future of our society and even our individual lives, if we used the proper equations and had powerful enough computers.  We now know this is not true.  The future cannot be accurately predicted for many reasons, including (a) quantum physics dictates that there is inherent uncertainty in all matter at the subatomic level, (b) many aspects of living systems are governed by nonlinear equations, which are chaotic and unpredictable, (c) emergence, an important part of the complex systems which underlie our world, is not predictable (see section 2 of Pernick: The Laws of Complexity and Self-organization: A Framework forUnderstanding Neoplasia).  However, if we have a basic understanding of the complex systems that underlie our political and economic worlds, we may be able to predict future events in a general sense, even if we cannot precisely determine specific details.
I consider myself an optimist, not a doomsayer.  But ignoring problems, or pretending they are not really problems, does not benefit society.

Update:  One example of a "small crisis" that occurred recently is the poisoning of the public water supply in Flint, Michigan, based on negligence by State government, led by Michigan's governor (see New York Times, 9 January 2016, Detroit Free Press, 10 January 2016).  See also my Blog article, "The Plan to Destroy America", which describes the factors leading to more crisis, and undermining our attempts to prevent or manage them.