Lost cities of the future
Oct. 8th, 2008 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollIt's not that uncommon for an Earth of the future to have worked its way down to a lower population than present. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, had a couple of novels with one billion person Earths. The historical peak is generally much higher than the steady state case and all those people had to be living somewhere. What do you think happened as the population declined and the habitations were no longer needed?
I suppose they were probably demolished in an organized way rather than being left to rot but the idea of a world where the ghost towns outnumber the living communities and where this is not due to some calamity like war or plague strikes me as potentially interesting.
Idea I'm not sure how to use: have the current population be high by our standards but lower than the peak the world population reached before beginning a long, slow decline. One of the scenarios in that UN report I keep mentioning has the population peak at over 9 billion and decline to about 8 billion. That's not as dramatic as I like. I'm think more a world with 10 billion people that once had 100 billion.
I suppose they were probably demolished in an organized way rather than being left to rot but the idea of a world where the ghost towns outnumber the living communities and where this is not due to some calamity like war or plague strikes me as potentially interesting.
Idea I'm not sure how to use: have the current population be high by our standards but lower than the peak the world population reached before beginning a long, slow decline. One of the scenarios in that UN report I keep mentioning has the population peak at over 9 billion and decline to about 8 billion. That's not as dramatic as I like. I'm think more a world with 10 billion people that once had 100 billion.
