Predictive programming or Time travel?

there are so many coincidences it makes no sense.. I don't even know how to explain it..

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;"

- W. Shakespeare (or his ghostwriter)

crux said:

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;"

- W. Shakespeare (or his ghostwriter)

Click to expand...

Ahh, yes, Shakespeare's " as you like it "... I vaguely remember purchasing that when it hit the news stands...that quote I think was the highlight of the whole story. So one day while at a bistro on the Thames I gave it away to a friend along with a painting I didn't care much for, a hideous excuse for watercolor by a chap named Monet...thought at the time this will never be popular either...lol....the world is a strange place I guess.....
...... OK that's my fifteen minutes on stage....who would like to add their story to the mix????
...great quote by the way.

I'm reminded of the eerily prophetic pilot episode of the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen depicting 9/11. The similarity is astonishing and just 6 months before the event actually occurred.

But there are so many creative minds out there and so many ways of retroactively drawing similarities to current events that I'll stop short of putting these things in the paranormal category. But I wouldn't call it sheer coincidence either in the sense of things being purely random. For given the state of the world at the time they were created all the works cited here are also very much in the realm of the probable.

Agree with UT in the sense that much of this is in the realm of probable.
But along the lines of the quasi paranormal, I believe that very creative people have a clearer channel to the collective unconscious. So maybe that is the mechanism for uncanny predictions.

Then again, we don't pay attention to all of the predictions that were wrong, or the books about a completely different virus or other bad ways that people die.

Paintman said:

I believe that very creative people have a clearer channel to the collective unconscious. So maybe that is the mechanism for uncanny predictions.

Click to expand...

If I'm not mistaken, the CIA has a relationship with Hollywood. This came to the surface a few years after 9/11 and suggested that intelligence agencies were using these creative resources to come up with likely ideas about how terrorists or other threats might emerge and thus bring to light ways in which they might be neutralized or contained. I believe also that there was, or maybe still is, a secret movie studio somewhere up in the hills or canyons around Hollywood with documented Hollywood/military/intelligence connections. I'll have to dig through my book shelf to find the actual location and name.

It isn't as surprising as you might think. The possibility or probability of a global pandemic is a fairly common thought in the circles where such things are fretted about. If you are going to write a novel you will do some research and Wuhan is a major manufacturing center with a growing biochemical industry. China, Russia or Iran are and have been the most common bad guys for fiction for a long time just as the Germans and Japanese were for a long time. If you look at the way the Spanish influenza spread it is fairly easy to see the possibility of a veritable superstorm of illness with the speed of modern transportation compared to the transportation of that time.

In some ways, I think that this is a horror story that is almost certainly to come true at some point but we MAY have headed this one off at the pass. The spread has been almost 100% people infected in China and then caught before they could become the center of a secondary source of infection in their home countries. World wide people are clamping down on people that have recently traveled fro infected areas. I THINK that the only two areas of possible epidemic problems other than in China may be in India and some parts of the African continent where Chinese investments have made travel there more common. The medical situation in those areas might be more easily overwhelmed due to both population densities and a low level of medical care for the poor.

It is interesting how many times after something happens that there is a book or something pulled up that seems almost predictive of that event. the thing is there are a LOT of books out there and the sort of things that interest people are going to revolve around things with high emotional levels. then there are the just weird coincidences. J. K. Rowling was sued for plagiarism by a woman that had written a book that was amazingly similar to her Harry Potter books. The similarity even went down to her having muggles in her book and little boy VERY similar to Harry Potte as the primary character. After exhaustive study and research, they never could find any connection where Ms. Rowling could have heard of the other book and so it was just written off as one of those coincidental things that happen.

I think that the most famous of these predictive books was the one written about a ship called Titian. " In 1898, 14 years prior to Titanic’s sinking, author Morgan Robertson published a book called Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan. The book was, wait for it… about a fictional ship called Titan, the largest ship ever built, which sank after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on a cold April night at around midnight!"

Along this same line, there is a system that watches the internet and keeps track of popular searches that has been amazingly accurate at seeming to predict a substantial increase in interest in certain places and things in the period just BEFORE a disaster happens to that person, place, or thing.

Paulm said:

Ahh, yes, Shakespeare's " as you like it "... I vaguely remember purchasing that when it hit the news stands...that quote I think was the highlight of the whole story. So one day while at a bistro on the Thames I gave it away to a friend along with a painting I didn't care much for, a hideous excuse for watercolor by a chap named Monet...thought at the time this will never be popular either...lol....the world is a strange place I guess.....
...... OK that's my fifteen minutes on stage....who would like to add their story to the mix????
...great quote by the way.

Click to expand...

YOU GAVE AWAY A MONET!!! I just passed out. !