My friend, a quantum physicist, once described to me that the reason so many people are skeptical of astrology is because they haven't found the correct probability distribution that maps their reality yet. There's an infinite configuration of calendars depending on whether you choose to measure your birthday and zodiac affiliation (if one can exist) using solar, lunar, Gregorian, Aztec or Jewish calendars. Different cultures also measure time across different planetary bodies because some center the Moon in their calculations, others include the orbit of large asteroids or even track the points of orbital intersection between the Moon and the Earth in the sky. Forecasting methods like tasseography or (the somewhat gruesome) haruspicy do not even require observable stellar phenomena.
So it is mathematically possible that one of these infinite horoscopes has been tracking your life down to exact detail, and you might know what your future beholds with certainty only if you found which horoscope has been mapping this probability distribution. Quantum physicists describe this process as the collapsing of the wave-function. Each collapse makes a reality possible, and yet at every point a reality exists, an infinite number of new wave-functions mapping the next moment in reality.
What's more interesting than the actual prediction systems in place is why we humans need to know the future. When I visited the Teotihuacan pyramids in Mexico, the tour guide tried to be delicate about mentioning how ritual human sacrifice was practiced among the Aztec ancients. Some sources (I'm not qualified to evaluate the accuracy of this) describe the human sacrifices as necessary to appease the gods. Appeasing the gods is also a way of trying to control for the future because you're asking to be saved from famine, invasions or diseases. There are no authoritative sources on why the city-complex at Teotihuacan was abandoned, which indicates that despite the sacrifices, the people of this magnificent city-complex must have felt abandoned by their gods as they fled for their lives. Sometimes the wave function is not all that collapses.
When people ask for the future, as I have found myself asking myself in a thousand different models the last week, they're asking from a place of anxiety. They're asking from a place of transition, because what is supposed to be next doesn't appear clear. I've moved to Philadelphia to finally start school, and I am overwhelmed with the reality of returning to school after seven years, discovering the wide disparity in the kinds of people in my class, re-learning the process of trial and error of finding your own people and as with every move to a new city, rediscovering oneself in a new environment.
As part of this journey, I've also been (re) studying a lot of statistics. For statisticians (or data scientists as identified by their linkedin labels), the truthiness of these probability distributions is also a measurable phenomenon. By setting p-values and alpha-values, you can estimate if it is likely for that data to exist under the distribution. By setting mathematical values and processes, we can approximate everything to a normal distribution because there are some properties of normal distributions that allow us to make intelligent guesses about future data or about the relationship of the sample of data collected to the population data (i.e. how different your set might be from millions of observed data over time).
It's funny because a statistical study means nothing if it's not replicable consistently over many tests, or larger samples. Even with mathematical methods, all these predictions come to nothing until time itself actually passes. The anxiety that brews in the interval between making the prediction and waiting for it to pass doesn't become tolerable because you choose math symbols to describe what the future might be or wait for the intersection of some planets in the sky.
You could say I'm measuring out my uncertainty using a lot of spreadsheets and planning tools. From tracking my classes, my recruitment options, my career plan (as of now) and even my extracurriculars, I keep trying to wait for the actual start of term by planning aggressively. This isn't just about school itself, I have spreadsheets for my writing, for what I'm reading, for what products I apply to my skin, and also for the kind of men I'd like to date. The last one recently inspired a conversation at a party where my friend said, "you need to be open to the idea of things happening outside of your spreadsheets." Obviously because like famine, or invasions or colonization, love is a violent and sweeping force. It is a likely wave function and one that I cannot be prepared for no matter what tools or resources I have at my disposal or what "planning strategies" I use.