Bear in mind that it's a field of active research, and I'm giving those more as starting points I plucked out from Google hits than necessarily endorsing those exact theories. Personally I would only defend a somewhat weaker idea, that the future isn't somehow entirely random, but that we can indeed look to theories like this for some understanding of the next few decades, modulo the technology wildcard. Or at least a much better understanding than just thinking it's all whims of fate and everything's on the table equally. I said some reliability on purpose... it's not totally reliable, but you can still do much better than nothing.
See also http://www.livescience.com/22109-cycles-violence-2020.html , which also has some very Google-able keywords.
Bear in mind that it's a field of active research, and I'm giving those more as starting points I plucked out from Google hits than necessarily endorsing those exact theories. Personally I would only defend a somewhat weaker idea, that the future isn't somehow entirely random, but that we can indeed look to theories like this for some understanding of the next few decades, modulo the technology wildcard. Or at least a much better understanding than just thinking it's all whims of fate and everything's on the table equally. I said some reliability on purpose... it's not totally reliable, but you can still do much better than nothing.