A massive environmental catastrophe is predicted, but help arrives in the form of new and utterly unexpected technology. America in the 21st century? No, London in the 19th. Some apocryphal Victorian, so the story goes, looked at the rate at which the number of horses on city streets was increasing and assured his peers that their capital would soon be knee-deep in horse manure. He got it wrong, largely because he failed to predict the imminent rise of the automobile. That brought its own problems, of course, but the point was that Victorians were blindsided by the future--which, as any would-be...
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