Medical textbooks from the Middle Ages contained a chart called "The Sphere of Life and Death."

 Doctors used it to predict health outcomes based only on a patient's name. 

The sphere was based on numerology, the Zodiac, the moon and starts.

 It's pseudo-science compared to modern metrics. But humans have always craved certainty. 

Diagnosis, prognosis, genetic predisposition. They're all ways of placing ourselves on the sphere. 

We ask science to protect us from the simplest fact of life: it's full of surprises. 

We trust science to predict the future. 

But even so, surprises are the only thing we can count on. 

Sometimes surprises are good. They lift you up and make life exquisite.

 But then there's the other kind of surprise, when the bottom drops out. 

However desperate you might be, don't look to the stars. 

Because they can't help you now.