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Accurate Picture Of Future: What better or more extreme evidence can there be to illustrate how science fiction has exerted its peculiar, unstoppable influence as a guide to the future? Nor does science fiction confine its power merely to accurate forecasting of the future. It can be a deliberately savage harbinger of pessimism, predicting what we all devoutly hope may never come to pass. In Frederik Pohl's "Census Takers" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1956), a world of the near future is described in which the census becomes a form of Russian roulette.
Since the mid-17th century science fiction writers have been prophesying, often with amazing accuracy, the technological advances of the last 300 years. In discussing the history of science fiction, the author—a scientist as well as a writer of science fiction—considers the extent to which contemporary "tomorrow seekers," living as they do at the dawn of the Space Age, present to this generation an imaginative and accurate picture of future scientific endeavors.
Picture, and the rate at which it is changing, he is then able to predict what the weather will be like at any point on his map in the near future. His work is nowadays made easier by upper-air observations (taken by weather balloons with radiosonde attachment) and photographs from weather satellites [6] that give him an astronaut's eye-view of patterns. Much of the forecaster's work of plotting and analysis has been automated and mathematical analysis plays an increasing role in forecasting as more accurate data from all levels of the atmosphere become available. |
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