Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of exploring potential futures instead of attempting to predict one specific future.
In this quote, Robert J. Sawyer highlights the role of individuals and society in deliberating various possibilities rather than clinging to a singular vision of the future. By offering a spectrum of future scenarios, we empower ourselves to make well-informed choices that align with our collective goals and values, fostering a proactive approach to societal development.
In practice
This quote could be used in discussions about climate change to explore different scenarios and their implications.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs.
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.
I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.
Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.
I'm not trying to copy Nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using.
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