It used to be the stuff of 2000AD, the comic that introduced the world to Judge Dredd and two vast crime-filled cities, Mega City One and East Meg One.
In its dystopian vision, the first mega city around New York began construction in 2030, intended to house three to four million people. In a sign of how quickly future dystopias age, the new Times Atlas of the World lists the growing club of real mega cities, all of them with predicted populations of more than 10 million -- not by 2030, but by 2005.
According to these estimates, Tokyo -- the world's largest city -- will hit nearly 27 million. Sao Paolo in Brazil will have just under 20 million people and Mexico City 19 million. Sixteen other cities are expected to exceed the 10 million mark, including Mumbai with 18 million and Dhaka in Bangladesh with 15 million residents.
Two cities in Africa are expected to go mega -- Lagos in Nigeria and Cairo in Egypt. According to the atlas -- the 11th edition since it was first published in 1895 -- the phenomenon is a mark of a global population in the grips of rapid urbanization, where close to 50 per cent of the population now lives in cities.
Indeed, the latest estimates predict that urban dwellers will outnumber the rural population for the first time by 2007.
And Tokyo is leading the way. A Landsat 7 image of the city, included in the atlas, shows the city's growth, a spreading grey cancer whose spiralling tendrils can be seen sucking in neighboring cities and towns and even reclaimed sea.
The rise of the world's mega cities is one of the most marked trends noted by the atlas in recent decades. It has been a process driven largely by Asia -- the continent boasting 10 mega cities by 2000, while North America had managed two (New York City and Los Angeles).
But the mega cities are not the only major human impact noted by the atlas. There has also been a catastrophic impact on the environment. The atlas's authors estimate that 90,000km2 of forest is being lost each year, the equivalent, since the last edition of the atlas in 1999, of an area the size of the British Isles.
But the greatest impact has come through global warming, with successive editions of the atlas showing shrinking ice fields and evaporating lakes. It reveals the rapid retreat of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, once the world's fourth largest lake and now the tenth.
Since the 1967 edition of the atlas it has shrunk by 39,994km2.
Since the 1975 edition, the surface of the Dead Sea has dropped by a massive 17m.
It is the availability of new digital satellite technology that has made the changes so shockingly apparent.
The atlas's chief cartographer, Sheena Barclay, said: "We are seeing things that you would not have seen 10 or even 15 years ago, changes that we can see by overlaying versions of our satellite images. And we are seeing a lot of concerning things."
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of global climate change came during the preparation of the present volume when the cartographers had to redraw the coastline of Antarctica after the Larsen ice shelf disintegrated last year.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.