A while back, we went over Isaac Asimov’s 1964 predictions for 2014. In the penultimate comment, Damien RS points out that Boston-Washington has not merged into a single city.
But who the hell knows what Asimov was talking about! He predicts that the corridor will have a population of 40 million by 2014. That is a pretty easy prediction to make, considering as it had a population of 37.2 million in 1960. (It hit 51.8 million in 2010.)
Moreover, the place was already almost an unbroken streak of urban areas, using the standard definition of 1,000 people per square mile. (Definition on page 3.)
The map is from page 6 of Megalopolis, published in 1961. Maybe Asimov meant to predict: “By 2014, there will be a bunch of suburbs built in Harford and Cecil County, MD, central New Jersey, coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island.”
To be frank, I would call this an even bigger fail than Damien did, because it shows that Asimov had basically no clue about geography or demography. This is in fact pretty obvious in Caves of Steel, where a world population of only 8 billion has somehow forced everyone to live in super-dense urban arcologies. Ditto the Foundation novels, where Asimov somehow predicted that a population of 40 billion on an Earth-sized world would require a planet-spanning structures hundreds (or thousands) of feet high. Predicting that an urban area would grow 7½% over 40 years is sort of less than perspicacious ... let alone stating that a 7½% population increase would imply the creation of a single city where one did not yet exist.
A little bit crazy about these things, Asimov was. Anyone know why?
Random guess: Asimov started with the conviction that the future was ginormous cities (which was pretty much a straight-line extrapolation from his recent past) and just plugged big numbers in the right places in his writings without actually doing any math.
Posted by: David Allen | March 11, 2015 at 11:19 PM