“Sometimes just one inch ahead is darkness” is a popular saying. It is not a saying the great French mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorcet would have subscribed to. “If man is able to predict, with almost complete assurance, those phenomena whose laws he understands, ... he can, using the experience of the past, predict the future with a high probability...” Between these two antipodal views of the future, Vaclav Smil strikes, as it were, a middle ground:
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A 2009 study studied this question.