Quote:
Originally Posted by DAHayden
David Brin's EARTH has an impressive list, from the Wikipedia entry:
Brin claims at least 15 predictive hits in Earth including:
The World Wide Web (including it as being a major news-media outlet, complete with videos and discussion forums) and blogging. (Brin did not predict the URL, rather using a clumsier numeric form of address.)
E-mail spam and sophisticated personalized filtering software.
Reduction of expectation of privacy.
Time limits on secrets both personal, corporate, and governmental
Levees breaking on the Mississippi.
The dissolution and partitioning of the Soviet Union (though most contemporary scholars later claimed that they were fully aware of the Soviet Union's impending collapse by 1989).
Global warming associated sea level rise and severe storm seasons.
Subvocal input devices.
Artificially created black holes considered seriously.
Crisis habitat arks for endangered species, with a view to later restoration to the wild.
Eyeglass cameras.
The erosion of personal privacy.
Eyeglass overlays on real environments.
Personality profiling through brain imaging.
Art sculptures on a geologic scale.
Decline of delivered mail.
Lawyer software. |
I'm not going to be quite as
harsh in my analysis.
I was researching solutions to The Greenhouse Effect just before Earth was published. It was pretty obvious to me that Brin had read the same papers. IIRC some predicted something like a global average rise of like 4-7 degrees (sounds small, but it's a global average). From there, you get certain models and statistics that predict sea level rise. Based on that, and changes in climate zones, you get consequences like levees breaking in Mississippi; not a hurricane, rather too much rain resulting in overflow/overwhelming of levees.
He also speculated on current environmental trends, such as the ozone hole: everyone wore extreme sunscreen, except a sun worshipping cult. (
Return of Paganism would be another prediction!)
He also had a group raising money for the Trillion Trees Project. That came straight from one paper I'd read about solving the Greenhouse Effect. Simple: plant a trillion trees worldwide! They would provide enough of a carbon sink to offset the greenhouse emissions at some predicted level. In all the papers I'd read, that stuck with me because I thought it the only viable solution; super awesome to see it in Brin's book!
While the Web had not yet taken off, Brin was a professor at UCI, and had access to e-mail (uci.edu) -- unlike most of the world at the time. SPAM already existed at that time, so he would have been aware of it, and again expanded on current trends.
He was on the Internet himself at the time (it was purely educational, government, and a few companies at the time) and speculated on it reaching the masses... which I thought the most impossible thing of all.
Anyway, I loved the book along with many of his others. (My big disappointment was meeting him in person, and him being a total weirdo.) His "Appendix" at the end of the book actually had historical examples of environmental disasters perpetrated by the likes of the Romans. We've been at this wrecking the environment thing for a long time, and I found that really enlightening.
-Pie