Two Thousand and One Predictions

Last night, on my new Kindle Fire, I started reading 2001. The movie of course is incomprehensible but I'm hooked on the book.

Arthur C. Clarke makes some interesting predictions.  He says in 2001 there are 6 billion people on Earth and pundits are worried about a looming food crisis. Today there are 7 billion humans on earth and our problem is that everyone is too fat. Clarke was writing this in the mid-60's.

This reminds me of another mid-60s sci-fi classic: Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! The novel takes place in 1999 and describes a hopelessly over crowded America, with tens of millions of people residing in Manhattan alone. Food and water rationing is a part of ever day life.  At the end we learn that America's population is upwards of 350 million.

Interestingly both men write about a China on the verge of superpower status.

So one prediction wrong one right.

Here's something else that Clarke predicts. In 2001 he has Dr. Haywood Floyd flying to the moon and holding a device that seems suspiciously like a Tablet or Surface with a screen filled with thumbnail icons representing various papers around the world which he need only tap to open and read...