A few days after 9/11 , rumour started circulate that action hero Jackie Chan had barely escaped with his lifespan . He had been slat to begin shoot a movie called " Nosebleed , " which involve a terrorist game to wing a plane into either the Statue of Liberty or the World Trade Center , reckon on who you talk to . The rumor was that Chan was supposed to have been fritter away it the morning of the attack , which would have put him on the roof when the planes hit . That call on out not to be true . He was still working on a dissimilar movie , and " Nosebleed " got cancel . But the matter of the movie was real , and it made the great unwashed wonder : How did the screenwriters experience that this could happen ? Did theypredictthese events ?
As it turns out , there ’s a whole theoryabout the power of media to predict and prepare us for the future . It ’s called predictive programming , and it encompasses not just terrorist flak but fresh technologies and the world of aliens .
How plausible is this theory ? Are we really in danger of placidly tolerating any changes that those in heraldic bearing like to make , but because of the medium we consume ? Stuff They Do n’t Want You To eff hosts Ben Bowlin and Matt Frederick take on all these questions and more in their episode " What Is Predictive Programming ? "
Coined by conspiracist Alan Watt , prognosticative programming is the theory that melodic theme , spot and new engineering science are cautiously compose into moving picture , TV show and book to dress the cosmopolitan population into consent societal change . illustration let in the pilot installment of " The Lone Gunmen , " where a hijacked sheet was flown into the World Trade Center as a false flag attack ; " The Dark Knight heighten , " which features a map of Gotham where one of the marked locations is Sandy Hook ; and an instalment of " Family Guy " in which Peter Griffin drives through the Boston Marathon , released only a few months before the bombardment at the 2013 Boston Marathon .
Predictive programming , the thought process goes , also can be a way to disclose something scary to people like say , the being ofaliens , without panicking the universe . Give multitude a few years of exotic brush movies , and then when you tell apart them it ’s all genuine , they ’re ready to trust and accept it .
Lots of these object lesson are legitimately creepy-crawly . For illustration , in Edgar Allan Poe ’s novel " The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , " a small ship ’s crew capsizes and tries to last . They pour down and eat a tortoise but eventually resolve they ’ll have to resort to cannibalism . They describe straws , and a serviceman named Richard Parker is the inauspicious first meal . Poe called it a " very silly story , " but simple months after issue , a four - person work party capsize , captured and rust a polo-neck , eventually decided to wipe out one of their own , and down a 17 - year - old kid … named Richard Parker . ( Dun dun DUUUUNNN ! ! )
So how likely is this theory to be true ? Not very . look at that we often see these traffic pattern after tragic events , not before , a more " retrodictive " than " predictive " type of thing . And then there ’s the fact thatscientists already turn to science fiction writersto help figure out technology course , how people might use a product , what the time to come could bet like . So are events predicted — or are we but predictable ? mind tothe podcastto find out more .
