indian make this worst decission :D

He was knighted by Mussolini for his prophetic meteorological skills and now internet rumours have revived acclaim for Raffaele Bendandi, an Italian seismologist who died in 1979 but decided that 11 May 2011 would be the day that Rome would be obliterated by an earthquake. His theory that the movement of the planets triggered seismic activity caused him to successfully predict an earthquake that killed 1,000 people in 1923. But Paola Lagorio, president of a foundation that is dedicated to Bendandi and preserves his archives, insisted he never forecast an earthquake in Rome on 11 May 2011.

As a new book, History's Worst Predictions, by Eric Chaline, shows, everyone from ancient prophets to modern futurologists have, more often than not, got the future spectacularly wrong.

The Maya

The Maya of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were obsessed with measuring time. They had two calendars but also deployed "the Long Count", counting forwards from the date of the creation of the world (8 September 3114BC, since you ask). Within the Long Count, their biggest unit of time was not a year or a century but the 144,000-day B'ak'tun. Because the number 13 was significant for the Maya, the conclusion of the 13th B'ak'tun – on the 21 or 23 December 2012 – has been viewed as apocalyptic.

Regardless of the dubious logic that this should herald the end of the world, the Mayan "prophesies" gained credibility with the perception that their civilisation was a peace-loving theocracy. "The truth is that even by the standards of ancient peoples, the Maya were technologically backward," argues Chaline. They lacked the wheel, the arch, the plough and domesticated animals; they fought each other and ruined their environment. Did the Maya foresee their own collapse in the ninth century or the Spanish invasion in the 16th? Or have cataclysmic events happened on key dates in their future-oriented calendar? No.

The village herbalist

It was an unpromising start for a soothsayer: a merchant's son in southern France dropped out of school because of the bubonic plague and spent eight years studying rural herbs. He was then expelled from university for continuing his work as an apothecary. Perhaps Michel de Nostredame had been smoking something because in 942 rhyming verses he apparently predicted every global tragedy from Hitler to 9/11.

In reality, Nostradamus was a poor astrologer and plagiarist who successfully wooed the credulous French ruling classes. All his supposed predictions have been deciphered retrospectively with a creative leap of the imagination. Some were inserted after the event.

The technophobes

Less soothsayers and more naysayers, some experts slip up when pouring scorn on new inventions. Irish mathematician Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) warned that 120mph trains would crush passengers' lungs and kill them. "Who would want to use it anyway?" asked US president Rutherford B Hayes of the telephone in 1876, while in Britain, William Preece, later engineer-in-chief of the Post Office, remarked: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." Henry Morton, the first president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, feared that Edison's lightbulb was "a fraud upon the public" and Marshall Ferdinand Fox called aeroplanes "interesting toys" with "no military value".

Computers

Futurologists now use complex computer models to make predictions but, as Chaline puts it, computers are often no better at discerning the future than "a sheep with a peculiarly shaped liver". Then there are the predictions about computers. In 1943 the president of IBM predicted a world market "for maybe five computers". Remember the panic over the millennium "bug" and the collapse of the banking system and all computerised civilisation? After lining geeks' pockets with $300bn to ensure the survival of the world as we know it, a few card machines failed to work for four days in millennial Britain while 150 slot machines conked out in Delaware.

The money talkers

Apart from weather forecasters, the most maligned futurologists of the modern era must be economists. We accept that politics will always be a confusing mess and that culture is unreadable (rock and roll will not outlast one summer, said Variety magazine in 1955), but we still – irrationally – expect data-crunching market gurus to be more reliable. Days before the Wall Street Crash in 1929, economist Irving Fisher reassured the public that stock prices had reached "a permanently high plateau". And did we really believe Gordon Brown, chancellor in 2007, that his government would not "return to the old boom and bust"?

The future is not just a foreign country. It is another world altogether. Viewed through a sceptical prism, climate change science, peak oil and all other contemporary fears are merely the latest in a long line of gloomy prophesies by modern doom-mongers. But unrelenting scorn for every prediction is a form of lethargy that abandons the precautionary principle, ignores scientific warnings that have been proved correct and leads to a disastrous lack of long-term planning. Fears for the future may, just, help keep us honest. However, if Rome has been reduced to rubble by the time you read this, you can add my name to the pantheon of great misreaders of the march of history.

• History's Worst Predictions by Eric Chaline is published by The History

He was knighted by Mussolini for his prophetic meteorological skills and now internet rumours have revived acclaim for Raffaele Bendandi, an Italian seismologist who died in 1979 but decided that 11 May 2011 would be the day that Rome would be obliterated by an earthquake. His theory that the movement of the planets triggered seismic activity caused him to successfully predict an earthquake that killed 1,000 people in 1923. But Paola Lagorio, president of a foundation that is dedicated to Bendandi and preserves his archives, insisted he never forecast an earthquake in Rome on 11 May 2011.

As a new book, History's Worst Predictions, by Eric Chaline, shows, everyone from ancient prophets to modern futurologists have, more often than not, got the future spectacularly wrong.

The Maya

The Maya of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were obsessed with measuring time. They had two calendars but also deployed "the Long Count", counting forwards from the date of the creation of the world (8 September 3114BC, since you ask). Within the Long Count, their biggest unit of time was not a year or a century but the 144,000-day B'ak'tun. Because the number 13 was significant for the Maya, the conclusion of the 13th B'ak'tun – on the 21 or 23 December 2012 – has been viewed as apocalyptic.

Regardless of the dubious logic that this should herald the end of the world, the Mayan "prophesies" gained credibility with the perception that their civilisation was a peace-loving theocracy. "The truth is that even by the standards of ancient peoples, the Maya were technologically backward," argues Chaline. They lacked the wheel, the arch, the plough and domesticated animals; they fought each other and ruined their environment. Did the Maya foresee their own collapse in the ninth century or the Spanish invasion in the 16th? Or have cataclysmic events happened on key dates in their future-oriented calendar? No.

The village herbalist

It was an unpromising start for a soothsayer: a merchant's son in southern France dropped out of school because of the bubonic plague and spent eight years studying rural herbs. He was then expelled from university for continuing his work as an apothecary. Perhaps Michel de Nostredame had been smoking something because in 942 rhyming verses he apparently predicted every global tragedy from Hitler to 9/11.

In reality, Nostradamus was a poor astrologer and plagiarist who successfully wooed the credulous French ruling classes. All his supposed predictions have been deciphered retrospectively with a creative leap of the imagination. Some were inserted after the event.

The technophobes

Less soothsayers and more naysayers, some experts slip up when pouring scorn on new inventions. Irish mathematician Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) warned that 120mph trains would crush passengers' lungs and kill them. "Who would want to use it anyway?" asked US president Rutherford B Hayes of the telephone in 1876, while in Britain, William Preece, later engineer-in-chief of the Post Office, remarked: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." Henry Morton, the first president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, feared that Edison's lightbulb was "a fraud upon the public" and Marshall Ferdinand Fox called aeroplanes "interesting toys" with "no military value".

Computers

Futurologists now use complex computer models to make predictions but, as Chaline puts it, computers are often no better at discerning the future than "a sheep with a peculiarly shaped liver". Then there are the predictions about computers. In 1943 the president of IBM predicted a world market "for maybe five computers". Remember the panic over the millennium "bug" and the collapse of the banking system and all computerised civilisation? After lining geeks' pockets with $300bn to ensure the survival of the world as we know it, a few card machines failed to work for four days in millennial Britain while 150 slot machines conked out in Delaware.

The money talkers

Apart from weather forecasters, the most maligned futurologists of the modern era must be economists. We accept that politics will always be a confusing mess and that culture is unreadable (rock and roll will not outlast one summer, said Variety magazine in 1955), but we still – irrationally – expect data-crunching market gurus to be more reliable. Days before the Wall Street Crash in 1929, economist Irving Fisher reassured the public that stock prices had reached "a permanently high plateau". And did we really believe Gordon Brown, chancellor in 2007, that his government would not "return to the old boom and bust"?

The future is not just a foreign country. It is another world altogether. Viewed through a sceptical prism, climate change science, peak oil and all other contemporary fears are merely the latest in a long line of gloomy prophesies by modern doom-mongers. But unrelenting scorn for every prediction is a form of lethargy that abandons the precautionary principle, ignores scientific warnings that have been proved correct and leads to a disastrous lack of long-term planning. Fears for the future may, just, help keep us honest. However, if Rome has been reduced to rubble by the time you read this, you can add my name to the pantheon of great misreaders of the march of history.

• History's Worst Predictions by Eric Chaline is published by The History

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