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Records are set every year. A record just means no observation was previously recorded. There's a catastrophe every generation that turns out to have been a f
by loons2 7y ago
Records are set every year. A record just means no observation was previously recorded.
There's a catastrophe every generation that turns out to have been a false alarm by the time the next generation's catastrophe is fabricated.
For instance, my wife was told "no homework tonight since we'll all be dead tomorrow anyway." (Cuban Missile Crisis)
Around the time of the first Earth Day, the predictions of environmental apocalypse were legion, yet societies somehow seem to find ways to fix things that societies broke. They also seem to find ways to fix things that tyrants broke.
When you see dozens of such dire predictions over a
lifetime, you start to get skeptical. Skepticism is a good thing, btw. Without it, there wouldn't be any science.
- mikeash 7y agoLots of catastrophes came true. Your example of the Cuban Missile Crisis is particularly odd: there was nothing at all overblown about the worry, and there’s a pretty good case to be made that the fate of the world came down to a single tired, sweaty guy in a submarine making the right decision.
- loons2 7y agoFor a couple weeks, there was almost nothing else in the news. JFK was a single tired guy in a submarine? We might be thinking of different Cuban Missile Crises. https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cuban-missile-crisis
- mikeash 7y agoVasily Arkhipov was a single tired guy in a submarine. The Soviet submarine B-59 was being depth charged and its captain wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at the US Navy fleet that was pursuing it. Two other officers had to agree to launch the torpedo. One agreed, and Arkhipov was the other. They argued but he refused and convinced the captain to surface. JFK's role was pretty important too. The military tried quite hard to convince him to go to war. Good thing he wasn't stuck in a broken-down, overheating submarine with explosions going off all around it, or he might not have been so steadfast. The world was on the brink of a war that would make WWII look like a fun walk in the woods. Am I supposed to think that a couple of weeks of non-stop news coverage was excessive?
- bubblewrap 7y agoI am a bit fascinated by the "Fin de Siècle" epoch. Those people were CORRECT in their pessimistic expectations. WWI and WWII happened soon after and killed many millions of people. Then again, without history books and museums, you'd barely notice today that those ever took place. So maybe even that was not as much of a doomsday event as feared.