Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balc

Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays? To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I think you have earned it if you've already done the work necessary to determine that a conjecture is wild and based on flimsy evidence. The author of the article didn't do that work. I won't be seduced into conjecture about the ellipsis, but evidence about the future is not so much hard to find (it's everywhere in fact; it's the present state of things) as hard to interpret. Still, there are lots of smart people working on predicting one or another aspect of the future. Often they're wrong, so I share your skepticism, but skepticism is different from denial or dismissal.