"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
Most of the time we make predictions based on how similar events happened in the past. For completely novel situations it's close to impossible to make a prediction and reckless to base policy on such a prediction.
That's strictly true, but I feel like you're misunderstanding something. Most people aren't actually doing anything truly novel, hence very few people ever actually have to even attempt to predict things in this way.
But it was necessary at the beginning of flight and the flight to the moon would've never been possible either without a few talented people being able to make predictions about scenarios they knew little about.
There are just way too many people around nowadays, which is why most of us never get confronted with such novel topics and consequently we don't know how to reason about it
Most of the time we make predictions based on how similar events happened in the past. For completely novel situations it's close to impossible to make a prediction and reckless to base policy on such a prediction.