Is the present the key to the future?

Earth sciences are largely based on the concept of the uniformitarianism, the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate today have always operated in the universe in the past. It summarizes and includes the gradualistic concept. Modern earth scientists do not apply this concept in the same way as in the past, since the present may not be long enough to study the past and geologic processes may had been active at different rates. Thus the forecast of future natural events is partly related to the knowledge of present-day processes. Even the debate concerning the relations between the past, the present and the future in geomorphology has not been discussed as regarding an approach inside the theoretical philosophy, despite its importance for geomorphic models. The concept that “the present is the key of the past” implies that we know the present, at least enough to be able to extend our knowledge back in time or forward to focus on the future. Therefore, even if future remains always unknowable, the accumulation of new data will anyway allow a deeper knowledge. Prediction is realized by the improvement of theoretical models which are able to forecast the future trends. The abstraction of theoretical models occupies a largest space rather than the empirism of measured data, since it is the sum of the space of actualism (measured data) and the space of possibility (the future). A considerable number of studies in epistemology shows that natural systems fall into the category of complex phenomena within which it is very difficult to forecast future conditions. Recent rates of global deglaciation shows we are actual in a overscale discontinuity moment and present-day measures are probably not representative of past and future trends. It is therefore required a deep rethinking of the category of reductionist scientific determinism that should consider also out-of-scale events.