Have We Reached the Comic Book Future?Ponder it for a moment. Most comics publishers in the 1970s posited a worse world in the future than existed then; it's safe to say that by 2000 or so they looked like pretty poor prognosticators.
But since 2001 we seem to have slipped into a comic book world. In October 2001 if I'd told you there would be an immense disaster in another US city, you would have assumed that it was a terrorist attack, right? So now we've had a terrorist attack beyond imagining and a natural disaster beyond our comprehension as well, leading to the botched evacuation of a major American city.
Now I'll admit, as I pointed out below, evacuation isn't easy. Suppose the enemy explodes a dirty bomb in Phoenix:
There are essentially six routes out of town and each of them has 2-3 lanes for the most part. If we assume nobody coming into town and appropriate the inbound lanes we can assume a maximum of 36 lanes.
To evacuate a metro area of about 3.7 million.
Well, you know what the problem with that is, right? These roads, that are equipped to handle a small percentage of the population at a time, will suddenly be asked to handle everybody at once. And cars are going to break down and people driving them will not be saying "Can I get a lift?"
And you can already see that I'm in a comic book reality.
