A bit of an aside in some commentary on Avatar “It is also worth repeating the observation that humans in American science fiction films almost always seem to be English speaking white-folk.”

Obviously having the characters of an American film or TV series speak English is convenient in a number of ways. But it also strikes me as at least plausible to speculate that English will be very widely spoken by future-people of the sort depicted in sci fi. It is, after all, the dominant language of international business and scholarship. And it seems more likely to me that as China develops more Chinese people will learn English than that Chinese will start to displace English. Among other things, English is already pretty well-established as something like a pure third party language—it’s what a South Korean visiting Stockholm or a Saudi trying to do a business deal in Nigeria would speak—so it has a vitality as a lingua franca that extends beyond the demographic of geopolitical clout of the English-speaking world.

Of course realistically the English spoken in the 24th century would probably be unfamiliar in many ways to a modern speaker. I assume that if Thomas Jefferson showed up in DC tomorrow and started talking there’d be a lot of confusion over vocabulary and accents and such.

The racial stuff is different. Based on what we know about the demographics of earth and the likely future trends, the predominance of white people in the future seems to imply some kind of fairly alarming event leading to massive die-offs among the non-white population.

Another factoid from the recently released population estimates is that after decades of decline, Washington DC has posted a strong decade of population growth and is now just a tiny bit shy of the 600,000 mark—basically where it was twenty years ago:

Something I think the city could use is some kind of explicit population growth target. That might help structure people’s thinking about specific development issues. The city’s peak population came around 1950 when about 800,000 people lived here. And the population of the United States as a whole was only 150 million back then. Given that the national population has doubled since then and continues to grow, it seems to me that a District with aspirations should be hoping to see a over a million people living here a few decades hence. That’s the alternative to endless sprawl. But since modern-day people occupy more space than the people of sixty years ago, the only way to make that work is with a combination of taller buildings and with buildings that occupy a larger share of the lots they’re situated in.

We’re in vacation mode this week at CAP, and I don’t like the tone of preening self-congratulation that tends to seep into blogging about other people’s risky political protests. But I do want to acknowledge what’s going on in Iran where people are out in the streets again, en masse, demonstrating for freedom and democracy and risking their necks against a regime whose security forces have a demonstrated willingness to shed blood and kill people.

Doubtless they don’t care what I have to say, but the crucial thing is for a critical mass of the people serving in the forces of the regime to recognize that those are patriotic fellow-citizens out there on the streets and it’s the dictators whose selfish desire for their own power and security is weakening the country.