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

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

It's partly racial, but mostly it's cultural and language based. We have very large groups (at least compared to fifty years ago) of, in particular, Moroccans and Turks who tend to stick together, speak their own language, and a relatively high percentage with some odd ideas about gender equality etc.

Having a large group of young furriners with nothing better to do hang around the streets all day and night is one thing, but when they're talking in a language you can't understand it adds a component of fear, rational or not: "are they talking about me? What if they're coming up with a game plan to attack me?". Entirely different from hearing "so what do you think, movie today?" or something like that.

And of course we do have some real White Power style racism here, as well. Neo-nazism appears to be pretty much dead, though, which can only be a good thing.