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. Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable — buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there’s about a 5-10% element that comes from the “who ordered that” dimension: nobody in 2010 expected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to be flying astronauts to the space station in a reusable, privately developed spaceship by 2020, nobody in 2005 expected Donald Trump to be elected POTUS in 2015, and so on.
More recently, 2016 prompted me to rethink this rule of thumb. Global climate change, accelerating technological developments in various fields (notably AI/deep learning and batteries), and political instability (in large part a side-effect of social media) made everything much more unpredictable. We’re now up to about 20% of 10-year-hence developments being utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the “here today” and 20-25% in the “not here yet, but clearly on the horizon” baskets.
COVID19 is clearly part of the 20% “who ordered that” collection. Nobody in March 2019 imagined that by March 2020 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 1994, which predicted more or less exactly what we’re living through today. What she didn’t predict in 1994 (writing in 1991-93) 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 the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it’s quite likely we’d be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.
Luckily both SARS and MERS are far less contagious than COVID19, but don’t count on this continuing. Those viruses still exist in animal reservoirs, and we know COVID19 circulates between humans and other species and can hybridize with other viruses. The worst easily-imaginable COVID19 variant would be a MERS/COVID19-Omicron hybrid—call it the Omega strain—with the lethality of MERS and the contagiousness of Omicron, which is worse than the common cold, somewhere around the same level as chickenpox. (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. There’s a reason public health bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns against them, despite these campaigns being so successful that deaths from these diseases are so rare, leading perversely to an upswing in vaccine denialism.
Remember, this isn’t a simple pneumonia bug. It’s a virus that attacks the RAAS/ACE2 system, in particula
