Everyone is flipping out after realizing that 21 years after Carl Sagan's death, his predictions have come true.
During his time, Sagan wrote a book titled "The Demon-haunted World," a book about the dangers of pseudoscience and scientific illiteracy.
There was an excerpt from his book which forecasted what America would be like. Apparently, his predictions were just as accurate as many would have thought.
Did the late astronomer just predict the rise of Donald Trump decades ago? The excerpt was circulated on social media this weekend:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
Inverse reported that it was Charles Bergquist, Director of Science Friday who first noticed the prediction. Many other scientists and experts reacted to the accuracy of the prediction.
Science Alert explained that while many would think that Sagan is the ultimate prophet, this could be interpreted like how we read our horoscopes -- "people see what they want to see." In this case, people might think that Saga's statement is very accurate because they choose to believe it. This cognitive bias is wired in all human brains.
"Now, it's important to remember that the "accuracy" of predictions is often a Rorschach test. An interpretation of a particular prediction's accuracy usually says a lot about the people interpreting them and their own hopes or fears for the future. And honestly, some of Sagan's concerns sound rather quaint," Matt Novak of Gizmodo notes.