Predicting the Future

I've been developing this idea in my head, of the evolution of football - and really, of all sports. Sports will, some time in the future, be focused on, in real time and in medical technological sophistication, the metabolic events of the players, as phenomena tightly correlated to the players' activity on the field.

I don't remember now how I came to this conclusion, but I can say with certainty that I came to it as a conclusion to a deep, connected train of thought, which is the more important matter. What that means for me is that I'm confident in the cogency of the meditation that brought me to this conclusion, and the power of the impression made on me by that meditation.

What does this mean about the conclusion itself? As a prediction of the future, nothing. As insight into the workings of human consciousness and the role of mechanical technology, something. What is the something? That we will never get to the bottom of the detail of even a game as simple and immediate as football, and that in the future we will reach new highs, and lows, of the detail we're focused on. Not only do the plays and strategies on the field become more complicated - involve more and more detail - but the same goes for all the external physical layers, in decreasing degree of immediacy, beginning with the players' physical bodies.

The game - and all games, and all sciences - if they evolve, gain in complexity, which implies detail. We zoom into the appearance of things, to find detail where we didn't notice it before. We look even more closely and carefully, and behold, more detail. It's like magic.

It may be that the next direction of attention and focus in professional football, for instance, will be to zoom into the invisible activity of the individual players - into their individual heart rates, blood pressure, real time EKG, EEG, MRI. These aspects will infuse the existing phenomenology of watching the sport - in person or on tv. Maybe, eventually, there would be a time when it's ONLY the EKG, EEG, MRI that are watched - there isn't any actual video capture of the players to watch. There may not even be a game anymore, in our sense, where the athletes are actually in a stadium together, crashing the physical bodies into one another.

So maybe I am predicting the future.