Earth in 2067 AD
While the roots of Rome's Revolution really precede 2067 AD, for our purposes, it was the state of the world at this point that creates the conditions producing the story. I will be including a little material in The Vuduri Companion that explains the origins of the Ark program but that won't be ready until next year.
All I did was presume that the world would be the way it is now, but whatever trends we see today would just continue. For example, our economy is a mess. I took the trend of more wealth getting into the hands of fewer people and just assumed life would be even harder in 50 years. In other words, the rich got even richer. I postulated that most people would live in tighter quarters, have less to eat (and drink!) and so forth.
Next, I assumed global warming wasn't going to get any better any time soon so I ramped up the hurricane season and invented Category 6 and Category 7 hurricanes. These monster storms were continent sized and forced people to start building domes over cities for protection which is the subject of tomorrow's post.
I also assumed that overpopulation is just going to get worse and extrapolated that the world would be nearing 10 billion people in about 70 years. Thus when the Great Dying took place, that was the number I came up with.
I assumed that terrorism is not going to ever go away and that at some point, it will spill over to our shores and become a constant, fear-inducing part of our lives. One of the little Intermezzos in Rome's Evolution shows Rei driving down a walled road and some horseback riders are blown up by an IED.
Finally, with so many people, I assumed that new diseases were going to be cropping up all the time. Little did I realize when I first started writing Rome's Revolution that some of those diseases were man-made. This, of course, formed the central plot of The Ark Lords.
The bottom line is, the Earth in 2067 AD is not that pleasant of a place and was only going to get worse. The Ark program was created, in part, in recognition of this fact and that some day a cosmic or man-made disaster was going to wipe out the species. Personally, I hope this is not true and as a society we start fixing things rather than making them worse but a dystopia is inherently more interesting (and dramatic) than a utopia.
Sorry.
All I did was presume that the world would be the way it is now, but whatever trends we see today would just continue. For example, our economy is a mess. I took the trend of more wealth getting into the hands of fewer people and just assumed life would be even harder in 50 years. In other words, the rich got even richer. I postulated that most people would live in tighter quarters, have less to eat (and drink!) and so forth.
Next, I assumed global warming wasn't going to get any better any time soon so I ramped up the hurricane season and invented Category 6 and Category 7 hurricanes. These monster storms were continent sized and forced people to start building domes over cities for protection which is the subject of tomorrow's post.
I also assumed that overpopulation is just going to get worse and extrapolated that the world would be nearing 10 billion people in about 70 years. Thus when the Great Dying took place, that was the number I came up with.
I assumed that terrorism is not going to ever go away and that at some point, it will spill over to our shores and become a constant, fear-inducing part of our lives. One of the little Intermezzos in Rome's Evolution shows Rei driving down a walled road and some horseback riders are blown up by an IED.
Finally, with so many people, I assumed that new diseases were going to be cropping up all the time. Little did I realize when I first started writing Rome's Revolution that some of those diseases were man-made. This, of course, formed the central plot of The Ark Lords.
The bottom line is, the Earth in 2067 AD is not that pleasant of a place and was only going to get worse. The Ark program was created, in part, in recognition of this fact and that some day a cosmic or man-made disaster was going to wipe out the species. Personally, I hope this is not true and as a society we start fixing things rather than making them worse but a dystopia is inherently more interesting (and dramatic) than a utopia.
Sorry.
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Bruce wrote: "I agree that the next 50 years will be a slow change into that future world.If we go back to 1950 and see what was predicted for the year 2000, the number of society changing technologies and eve..."
That was kind of my point. I didn't want to postulate "NEW" trends, just exaggerate trends we see today. Who cares if cellphones fit just into the earpiece (see Intermezzo 1) or on the wrist or a Star Trek pin, they are still just cellphones. And so on.
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If we go back to 1950 and see what was predicted for the year 2000, the number of society changing technologies and events was not as extreme as predicted.
It is probably a safe bet that the world will be a bit different in 2067 than it is today. But not much. Things tend toward the extremes? More of what we have now?