Divination is Real, but not Really
Did you know that it is actually possible to predict the future, very accurately?
No, really — astronomers do it all of the time. With access to a telescope the size of a building and a brain-melting amount of calculus, it’s possible to do things like predict the precise locations of stars in the sky years in advance.
After thousands of years we’ve found a priesthood who can actually divine the future. Bananas. The prognostication Olympics have been cancelled because ballistics team took home every medal for 4 centuries straight.
Technically, physics calculations should also be able to tell you things like which pip on a numbered die will come up when you roll the bones, or what the weather will be like tomorrow — but it turns out that in complex systems like “fluid” or “most other things”, chaos intervenes: microscopic changes in initial velocity and position produce such wildly different outcomes that mathematical models can’t reliably produce exact predictions.
Instead, probability and statistics had to step up and deliver the ability to predict the unpredictable. Despite being unable to accurately divine the outcome of a single dice roll, I can very accurately use mathematics to determine the probable outcome of 1,000,000 die rolls: their sum will be a stone’s throw away from 3,500,000. Probably1.
We are, in fact, prediction engines, constantly engaged in the task of measuring, modelling, and predicting our surroundings. It would be impossible to participate in traffic or play Poker if we weren’t.
I say this in order to establish that predicting the future is, in fact, possible.
Cartomancy, however, is utter and complete horseshit.