More fodder

[james_davis_nicoll]

Nicked from the UN report, via a post of mine:

Three Earths in 2100:

                Growth Scenario

Region          Low     Medium  High

Africa          27.5%   24.9%   23.1%
Asia            52.1    55.4    57.5
Latin America
and Caribbean    7.4     8.1     8.4
North America    5.8     5.2     5.0
Europe           6.6     5.9     5.6
Oceana           0.6     0.5     0.5

Population       5.5B    9.1B   14.0B   
      

While I freely admit that migration in the past has seen small groups provide disproportionate fractions of migrants and that population models are often incorrect, this seems to me to indicate that all other considerations being equal, the pasty white with the occasional visible minority in the background model used in a lot of SF set in near future interstellar settings is likely to be wildly incorrect.

Comments

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

What are the racial demographics of rasfw anyway? I get the distinct impression that if you took a random sample of Information Technology people and compared it against rasfw -- a fair comparison, I think, although I suspect that the IT sample average would be richer and better educated -- it would be much more non-white, and significantly more female.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No idea.

Just glancing over the 40 most present posters,

http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/reportcard.aspx?tp=14&sd=12/12/2005&ng=rec.arts.sf.written

I know that a number of the posters are Jewish but that seems to be the largest minority group. I am not seeing a lot of Asian names, for example. Given the history of the New World, guessing at skin colour from surnames is iffy at best but offhand I can only recall one living poster who has mentioned that they are black [1].

1: On the other hand, so few conversations about SF go "And so I think CRYPONOMICON could have been vastly improved with fewer pages and by the way I am naturally tanned." This is because Cryptonomicon is about as SFnal as Heck Ramsey.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I suspect there are many conversations about SF and race that aren't being had because the demographics of the genre approach monochrome.

[raycun.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't the better control group be 'IT people 15 years ago', given the lack of new blood on Usenet?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

There's practically no barrier to entry to Usenet, so no.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

The barrier is even knowing it exists, I'd say.