In 1973, ‘Soylent Green’ envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.
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Like most doom predictions, it got nearly nothing right. I remember 1973 very well. The air and water are much cleaner now than they were then. There's plenty of food. If it weren't for the current out of control inflation, gasoline prices, open border, and Chinese flu doom mongering, most things would be better now (like they were two years ago).
share"Like most doom predictions, it got nearly nothing right."
It's much more nuanced than your comment suggests.
A comparison might be the current pandemic. Here in Canada, projections indicated we were going to overwhelm our health care system. We took major steps and begrudgingly accepted lockdowns, masking and vaccinations with the result that our mortality rate is about 1/10 that of the States which chose to largely not take the same measures.
But now some people up here make the same argument... there was no need to lockdown, wear masks, get vaccinated because covid wasn't as bad as predicted. It's illogical thinking.
Similarly, in the 70s pop culture was predicting a terrible future if then current trends didn't change. Books, movies, news articles... It slowly dawned on people and politicians that things needed to change and so clean air and clean water laws were enacted here in Canada and the US.
So yeah, it got things wrong, but only because it was part of a societal trend that demanded and pushed for changes to avoid the future it was predicting.
Finally, you are mostly talking about North America and other First World countries. In many parts of the world, things are much more dire than they were in the 70s. We are somewhat insulated from those problems thanks to technology and geography, but they are slowly flowing over the dike we're built for ourselves.
@liscarkat
Except that there's a lot more microplastic contamination of the environment now, and the soil is more degraded, there's a lot of pollution from fertilizer runoff, and synthetic "forever chemicals," and the numbers of wild species of animals, even insects (incl. pollinators) are way down from where they were fifty years ago, and we are starting to see reduced crop yields. Even the nutrient content of food crops is less than it once was, due to pollution and soil degradation.
And, of course, climate change has intensified and is rapidly approaching irreversible tipping points.
But otherwise, yeah, everything is a LOT better, because the rich have got theirs, own the federal government, and are paying less in taxes than they were fifty years ago.
But we are not likely to see an overpopulation problem such as depicted in this film, due to declining human fertility, and increased incidence of infectious disease in the future, as tropical diseases like malaria spread, and we encroach on and destroy habitat.