[WorldMaker]

They thought they could predict it with high confidence a couple decades ago and then they learned more and confidence lowered again. That's kind of the nature of science, use what you know to find out what you don't know, and keep adjusting your models as you go.

That's also something of the paradox at work at something like this: you sometimes can't have models that strongly predict interesting or "good" outcomes (such as the "island of stability") without a lot more data from experiments and maybe you aren't running the right experiments because you don't have the right model, but you won't have the right model until you run more experiments.