Knowing

In 1959, William Dawes Elementary School in Lexington, Massachusetts, comes up with the idea of burying a time capsule on the school grounds to be opened in 50 years time. Each of the students puts in a drawing of what they believe the future will look like. Young Lucinda Embry’s contribution is a page of numbers. In 2009, John Koestler is an astrophysics professor at MIT who is raising his son Caleb on his own after the death of his wife. John accompanies Caleb to the school for the opening of the time capsule. The piece of paper that Caleb pulls out happens to be Lucinda’s page of numbers. Afterwards, John puzzles over the numbers and then realizes that each numeric sequence contains the date of a disaster that occurred after the time capsule was buried and the exact number of people killed in it. John realizes that there are three disasters that have yet to happen. He is witness as a plane crashes nearby while he is caught in a traffic jam – and on the date and with exactly the number killed as predicted by Lucinda. He realizes that the other numbers are latitude and longitude of the area where the disasters occur. He contacts the late Lucinda’s daughter Diana Wayland and sets out to prevent the other disasters from occurring. But then the two of them realize that the final sequence means that all life on Earth is going to be extinguished by a solar flare from the sun.