Back to: Quantum of Nightmares Forward to: Brief commercial interlude. Back in December of I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here , continue with this , and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth.
About 15 years ago, when I was working on Halting State , I came up with a rule of thumb for predicting the near-future setting in SF.
More recently, prompted me to rethink this rule of thumb. Nobody in March imagined that by March the UK would be in lockdown and they'd be storing corpses in refrigerator lorries in New York and Milan. It's not entirely a black swan; anyone who knew about the history of pandemics knew to expect something like it in due course, and indeed Laurie Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for her book, The Coming Plague in , which predicted more or less exactly what we're living through today. What she didn't predict in writing in is almost more interesting than what she did— nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later.
If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years. Those viruses still exist in animal reservoirs, and we know COVID19 circulates between humans and other species and can hybridize with other viruses.
We don't remember how awful chickenpox was because a we're generally vaccinated in infancy and b it's not a killer on the same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox. But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows.
