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From Earthly Equifinality to Cosmofinality: The Astrohydrologist's Odessey

Sep 2026 · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)

Abstract

This speculative futures essay follows a hydrologist across the eras of the discipline, from empiricism through computation, remote sensing and artificial intelligence to an imagined astrohydrology, as Earth’s water cycle collapses after an off-system solar anomaly. Told in the first person from the year 2100, it uses a coined vocabulary of "finalities" (unifinality, multifinality, system, computational, data and neural equifinality, and their cosmic extensions) to dramatize a scientific idea: that similar outcomes can arise from different causes, that observations and learned models may fail to discriminate among them, and that prediction without explanation cannot avert catastrophe. The essay is fiction, written to accompany scholarly work on equifinality in hydrological modelling and on the epistemic limits of AI-based prediction; the coined terms are listed in the appendix in order of appearance.

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