Shades of Asimov's Foundation, with Hari Seldon's "psychohistory" predicting the rise and fall of galactic empires...

An article in this week's New Scientist tells about a mathematician in America who's claiming to be achieving the same kind of predictive abilities:

"The mathematics underpinning the rise and fall of empires suggest that the US faces imminent and bloody unrest. How worried should we be?

PETER TURCHIN thinks he can see the future. Unlike the fortune teller you might find at a seaside carnival, he needs no crystal ball. Instead, the tools of his trade are mathematics and testable theories. Armed with these, his goal is nothing less than to revolutionise the study of history, turning it from a mass of anecdotes into a rigorous, predictive science.

Turchin calls his new discipline cliodynamics, after Clio, the classical Greek muse of history, and so far its biggest focus has been the fate of empires. Now Turchin is using patterns he has found underlying their rise and fall to make predictions of political changes to come. His forecast is alarming. If his calculations are correct, the US faces major civil unrest and political violence sometime around the end of this decade."...

And so forth. It's too long to paste here, but it's still available on the New Scientist site for another six days, and no doubt it'll be available somewhere on the net via Google.

Of course predicting future trends isn't new (even aside from the Bible prophecy merchants). Marx did it long ago, and his predictions seem to be working out pretty accurately, but not with the time scale his fans tended to assume, though of course he never went in for any time scale. Turchin interestingly enough does do so, a la Hari Seldon...