As the novelist Frank Herbert once said: “The function of sci-fi is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.” That leads us into a strange paradox: the better we manage to contain this pandemic, the less we will learn from it. Because there is one thing you can bet on for sure: as soon as this whole crisis blows over, the same minimalists will come forward and claim that it wasn’t as bad as the “fearmongers” had told us. Indeed, some of them are already busy committing that very fallacy.

Maarten Boudry, Postdoctoral Researcher of the Philosophy of Science, Ghent University

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