Other writing
To fill in a gap in my timetable during the last year of my degree in the early '80s, I signed up to an anthropology course (at the time, it seemed marginally more interesting than History and Philosophy of Science, although I'm not so sure now).
I needed to find a subject for an assignment, and I pulled from the anthropology section of the main Science library a collection of essays to try and find some inspiration.
Looking through the index, I saw an article on current and future society, and was shocked to see that it was written by the aforementioned Isaac Asimov. I was a prolific Science Fiction reader at the time, and consumed this with some gusto, very interested in what he had to say on the subject.
He was very prophetic. The article had been written in the late 1960s or early '70s, and he was already worried about the population on Earth, the tension between population and resources, and the role technology would take in allowing the planet to support this increasing population (if you remember, he had theorized about a world that was completely built over in his Sci-Fi, Trantor, in the Foundation series).
He came up with some startling conclusions. He said the role of Religion in promoting large families (particularly Catholicism, but also non-Christian religions) had to be countered, that birth control had to be promoted and made freely available particularly to the poorest in society, and that increase in population for some 2nd and 3rd world countries had to be downgraded as a indicator of the success of those countries. The most startling was that he was saying that homosexuality should not only be accepted, but should be promoted as a whole-life lifestyle, if only as a population control measure! (although I'm not sure what he would have made about surrogacy and other methods, as I got the impression that he thought that same-sex relationships would be childless).
In the time since, I have read a number of his collected non-fiction articles (as well as some of his crime fiction), and I'm sure that my current world-view has been very heavily influenced by what he wrote, as the more I read, the more it chimed with my own thinking.
I did not pick up that it was AIDS that had killed him. It's somewhat ironic I think to find that someone who was so prophetic, and knew about biochemistry, was killed essentially by a side effect of a technology he had not picked up on.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
