RandomGuy
04-19-2010, 12:09 PM
I was watching the sci-fi "event" Riverworld the other night, and saw the same ethno-centric assumption played out in the casting/story.
Fully 1/6th of all humanity today is ethnic Chinese, and the same goes for Africans, and Indians.
That makes 1/2+ of humanity non-western/european/whatever.
Yet in every series or story about "the future" you dont see this reflected in either the story or the casting.
Think back to any star trek crew and ask yourself if it was even close to this present ratio.
The Riverworld story posits that the earth was destroyed somehow, and people from "all epochs" were being ressurected by some advanced science on a "Riverworld".
Yet, the number of asians/indians/africans never even came close to being 1/2 the charactors shown.
The number of people alive today is more than have ever been in existance in all of human history.
Given this, if a random sample of humanity were drawn from all of human history, the vast majority of them would be alive today, completely dwarfing the number of people from past ages.
Yet in this series, somehow a Spanish conquistador and his tiny army managed to become a powerful warlord who scoffed at the "weak Americans" who would outnumber his army millions to one.
Sorry for the nerd attack. I think about these things waaaay too much.
Fully 1/6th of all humanity today is ethnic Chinese, and the same goes for Africans, and Indians.
That makes 1/2+ of humanity non-western/european/whatever.
Yet in every series or story about "the future" you dont see this reflected in either the story or the casting.
Think back to any star trek crew and ask yourself if it was even close to this present ratio.
The Riverworld story posits that the earth was destroyed somehow, and people from "all epochs" were being ressurected by some advanced science on a "Riverworld".
Yet, the number of asians/indians/africans never even came close to being 1/2 the charactors shown.
The number of people alive today is more than have ever been in existance in all of human history.
Given this, if a random sample of humanity were drawn from all of human history, the vast majority of them would be alive today, completely dwarfing the number of people from past ages.
Yet in this series, somehow a Spanish conquistador and his tiny army managed to become a powerful warlord who scoffed at the "weak Americans" who would outnumber his army millions to one.
Sorry for the nerd attack. I think about these things waaaay too much.