SCIENCE FICTION novels written in the nineteen forties, fifties and sixties often described a future world of nineteen eighty, nineteen ninety, twenty hundred, and twenty twenty; all of those "predictions" turned out to be wrong.
My ninth grade teacher didn't hold out any hope that erlich might be wrong, and that, and the mangled bodies in driver's ed movies, was enough to fill my teen age years with fear and anxitey.
We have made it all the way to the year twenty twelve without a singular nuclear bomb hurled in anger since nineteen forty five, and that's something to be proud of. And it surprised science fiction writers.
In nineteen sixty nine my ninth grade science teacher held up a copy of the book "The Population Bomb" by Paul Erlich, which was quite popular. In it he predicted huge horrible famines in the nineteen nineties, due to population increase.
I saw the future as a mixed bag of space travel, computers, famine, war, and epidemics.
Erlich borrowed from Thomas Malthus, who in the seventeen hundreds pointed out that human populaton increase would be exponential, and agricultural production increases could only be additive. But due to hybrid agriculture, the famines have been somewhat less severe than predicted, thank god.
Now the science fiction writers have moved on, and are at it again. They now foresee the late twenty first century and twenty second centuries filled with spacecraft, space travel, space stations, space colonies, and scientific progress, but once again good ole earth gets the short end.
Earth is overpopulated, crime ridden, environmentally devastated, disorganized, chaotic, decadant, dying. Chances are, in a couple hundred years, our descendants will once again prove 'em wrong.
Even now I can see my great great great grand children laughing in the sun on the surface of a beautiful, happy earth...
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