By Futurist Thomas Frey
Physicist Kip Thorne once posed a question that should keep us all awake at night: “1000 years from now, what things will be possible and what things won’t?” It’s a profound challenge to our assumptions about reality itself. But here’s an even more unsettling question: how much of what we believe today—what we build policies around, invest billions in, teach our children—is simply wrong?
Samuel Arbesman’s book “The Half-Life of Facts” quantifies something we intuitively suspect but rarely confront: everything we know has an expiration date. Scientific facts, medical knowledge, historical understanding—all of it decays over time, replaced by better information, corrected understanding, or entirely new paradigms. And the decay is measurable, predictable, relentless.
The implications are staggering. We’re making trillion-dollar decisions, shaping civilizations, and planning futures based on knowledge that we can statistically predict will be proven wrong. We just don’t know which parts yet.
Continue reading… “The Expiration Date of Everything We Know”