It's not. The first Blade Runner was set in 2019, where LA had a population of 106 million (from the original voice over by Harrison Ford). That was the 80s apocalyptic view of our time as an overcrowded and polluted hell where people have to crowd into massive cities for survival.
If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare.
2049 was a continuation of that alternative future, which had flying cars, off-world colonies and strong AI in the form of synthetic, fleshy humans. IOW, nothing like the actual future, to date.
"If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare."
Isn't it amazing how all the past predictions of environmental doom have been wrong?
It is. Elrich's population bomb was an earlier example that has been wrong so far. I recently re-read Whitley Strieber's Nature's End, published in 87. Although a fictional account of the future similar to the Blade Runner movies (in terms of environmental impact), it embodied the idea at the time that the Earth couldn't support several billion humans. Set in the mid 2020s, the northern forests were dead from acid rain, the Midwest was a desert and the Amazon had mostly burned down. 7 billion humans had completely decimated the biosphere.
So I'm a little skeptical whenever the latest doomsday predictions roll around.
