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This all makes sense to me
I recall an episode on PBS where a crew went to study the most primitive 'bushmen' found in Namibia.
They were comparing how they hunted compared to lions.
They stated that humans ability to extrapolate forward (predict) base upon tracking info was a crucial difference between the 'bushmen' & other alpha predators.

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On Fri, 11/13/15, Timothy Collinson <xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:

 Subject: [TML] Mental time travel
 To: "xxxxxx@simplelists.com" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
 Date: Friday, November 13, 2015, 2:06 AM

 I’m currently
 reading (very slowly as it’s my “login” book
 at work) _In Search of Time: journeys along a curious
 dimension_ by Dan Falk.  I would
 highly recommend this as a very
 readable and interesting look at the subject of time
 generally.  But today I’ve come to
 an interesting section
 in which he talks about “mental time travel” – the
 ability to think outside the
 present.  A couple of paragraphs
 particularly struck me and seemed relevant to Traveller even
 though I suspect
 he’s only talking about our immediate futures – not the
 57th century:

 “Thomas Suddendorf
 (University of Queensland) and Michael
 Corballis (University of Auckland) have argued persuasively
 that the capacity
 for mental time travel gave our ancestors an invaluable edge
 in the struggle
 for survival.  They believe there is
 a
 profound link between remembering the past and imagining the
 future.  The very act of remembering,
 they argue,
 gives one the “raw material” needed to construct
 plausible scenarios of future
 events…

 … as far as your
 brain is concerned, the act of remembering
 is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future…
 while we do not “remember”
 the future, we do picture it, and it turns out that we do so
 in ways that
 closely parallel our efforts to picture past events.”

 “In fact, they
 claim, what we have traditionally thought of
 as memory’s primary role – allowing us to conjure up the
 past – may be “only a
 design feature of our ability to conceive the future.”

 He goes on:

 “Other observations support
 this idea.  Psychologists have found
 that imagining an
 event in the remote future is more difficult that imagining
 an event closer at
 hand, just as remembering a more remote past event is more
 difficult that
 remembering an event that happened more recently.  We also seem to lose both
 “directions”
 together: as we age, our powers to use episodic memory being
 to fade, along
 with our ability to envision the future.”

  

 The questions which
 immediately leapt to mind were:

 Did Marc Miller do
 such an excellent job of envisioning and
 describing a 57th century because of his
 background as a history
 major (IIRC)?

 Would I be better at
 the future if I read and studied more
 history (which was never a favourite at school but is
 becoming increasingly
 interesting to me now a little late in the game)?

 Do I need to get my
 ideas for adventures/characters/whatever
 down now, l as quickly as possible, before the ability to
 envision the future
 begins to fade?!  (Or is this kind of fictional invention
 different to imagining what could be a 'real'
 future?)

 tc

  

 Oh, and the author
 promises we’ll get to physical time
 travel in chapter 8.  I’ll keep you
 posted if it’s interesting.

  

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