Time Machine Statements

Something I've always found funny and sometimes annoying are statements like this:

"The market for X will be 4 times what it is today by 5 years from now."
"It will take 4 years for the price of SSD drives to become competitive to traditional disk drives."
"Wall Street analysts agree that X will be selling at Y by the same time next year."

And so on...

I call these Time Machine Statements.

Because they are statements that can only be made with a straight face by someone who has just stepped out of a time machine, returning from a voyage to the future. In the magic Time Machine. Which, of course, don't exist. And therefore, what they are saying is nonsense. It's not factual. It's bullshit.

At best what they're saying is "Given a certain set of assumptions, and given current trends, and there's nothing else happening today or will happen tomorrow or the day after or a year from now, that could impact this prediction, that I have not already taken into consideration etc., then if I take a certain number and apply a certain equation or algorithm to it, it yields of value of Y around T units of time from now."

That's it. Basically, they've taken some numbers, made a few simple assumptions, they abstract away most of the details of nitty gritty REALITY and come up with a pretty graph. And the graph goes up or down or whatever. And all they're doing is giving you a summary description of that graph.

But what they have not done is describe the future in a factual way. Because they have not stepped out of a Time Machine.

As a counter-point to this, I'd like to give some examples of the types of statements you can make about the future, with a straight face, and without the benefit of a Time Machine.

"It will be darker tonight than it was at noon."
"I live in Chicago and I can assure you it will be colder and darker, with shorter days, during the winter than it will be during the summer."

That's a smart and 99.999%+ reliable way of making believable statements about the future. (Notice I did not say 100%: perhaps there will be some celestial event or nuclear conflaguration that night which lights up the sky enough that it's as bright as the day. But on 99.9999%+ of the days experienced by all of humanity so far in the past, it appears, that has not been the case.)

No Time Machine needed. No crack pipe need be smoked.