Inferno
In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date. In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon, is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces... Dante’s Inferno. Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust... before the world is irrevocably altered.
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2016–2025years
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What Hacker News says
- Wow, this is a terrible interview. The interviewer repeatedly references his book Inferno. I like the Telegraph review of it, "Don't Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown", available here sans paywall: https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
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- This weirdly reminds me of Dan Brown's "Inferno"
- > This causes the lab to unknowingly produce a highly contagious bioweapon which causes infertility.
I don't think this would be a bad thing :) Some people will always be immune, humanity wouldn't die out. And it would be a humane way for gradual population reduction. It would create some temporary problems with elderly care (like what China is facing now) but will make long term human prosperity much more likely. We just can't keep growing against limited resources.
The Dan Brown book Inferno had a similar premise and I was disappointed they changed the ending in the movie so that it didn't happen.
- Tl;dr gpt4 seems to have detailed knowledge of the following copyrighted books (The first half of the list)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone J.K. Rowling 76%
1984 George Orwell 57%
The Fellowship of the Ring J.R.R. Tolkien 51%
Fifty Shades of Grey E.L. James 49%
The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins 48%
Lord of the Flies William Golding 43%
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 43%
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 30%
The Silmarillion J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien 28%
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 27%
A Game of Thrones George R.R. Martin 27%
The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown 26%
Dune Frank Herbert 26%
Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 25%
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 25%
Casino Royale Ian Fleming 24%
Neuromancer William Gibson 22%
Ender's Game Orson Scott Card 20%
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 19%
Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell 18%
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 17%
The Lost Symbol Dan Brown 16%
Inferno Dan Brown 15%
Divergent Veronica Roth 15%
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 15%
- It's also kind of the plot of Dan Brown's 'Inferno', per wikipedia:
> Brooks explains that Zobrist was a geneticist who advocated the halting of humanity's growth, and that he... had supposedly developed a new biological plague that will cause infertility in a third of the worlds' population, in order to solve the problem of the world's impending overpopulation... ...The plague that Zobrist created is revealed to be a vector virus that randomly activates to employ DNA modification to cause sterility in one third of humans.
Close enough! it's hard to have an original idea
- I recently read Dan Brown's Inferno - not a great reference work by any stretch, but some compelling arguments are made along the lines you suggest.
I suspect there is a lot more to it than just limiting the numbers of babies born. If there are more resources per person (a consequence of fewer people) then we will likely see the resources used per person go up.
Anecdotally - American cars are terribly inefficient with respect to fuel consumption. This is I think partly due to the low cost of fuel. In the UK, however, the cost of fuel per litre is almost double that of the US, and consequently people gravitate toward much more efficient vehicles.
Additionally - China has been a huge polluter for quite some time despite one child policies though admittedly it's partly because the global economy outsourced their pollution to China to a degree.
