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The idea that the moon makes people go weird is one that’s been around for centuries. It’s literally where the word lunacy comes from; it’s why we have werewolf mythologisms. Agriculture hung around not because it made everybody’s lives better, but because it gave societies a Darwinian leg up.
As the author Jared Diamond, a proponent of the “agriculture was a horrible mistake” theory, put it in a 1987 article in Discover magazine: “Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare and tyranny.” In short, we went for quantity over quality
The Gulf of Mexico is a massive plume of mostly ruined sea, spreading out from where the fertilizer running off the agricultural lands of the southern USA has caused great algal blooms. Large bodies of water erupting into flames may be one of the more dramatic examples of humanity’s unerring ability to take natural world around us and make it worse.
The Graveyard of Gadgets
Guiyu in China is an infamous 20-square-mile graveyard of the world’s unwanted gadgets. Until recently, it was hell on earth, with thick plumes of black smoke filling the air and toxic heavy metals leaching into the soil. The Chinese government cracked down on it in the past few years, enforcing higher health and safety standards.
Loose Rabbit Virus
In the 1990s, Australian scientists were working on rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus. They were doing this on an island off the south coast, to reduce the risk of the virus getting loose. Guess what happened? In 1995, the virus got loose and spread to the mainland.
In the 20 years since rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus was mistakenly released into the wild, rabbit populations in South Australia have declined again. But vegetation has returned and the many animals that had been pushed to the brink of extinction on have seen their numbers surge back. Let’s just hope that rabbit fever virus doesn’t turn out to have any other side effects.
Sparrows in China
Some of the solutions were obvious and sensible—mass vaccination programs, improved sanitation, that sort of thing. Mao decided (without bothering to do anything like, you know, ask experts their opinion or anything) to add in two other species, as well. Flies were to be wiped out, on the grounds that flies are annoying, and sparrows because they eat grain.The problem with sparrows, the thinking went, was that they ate grain. A single sparrow could eat as much as 4.5 kilograms of grain every single year—grain that could be used instead to feed the people of China.
They did the math and determined that 60,000 extra people could be fed for every million sparrows that were eliminated. Who could argue with that? The Four Pests campaign began in 1958, and it was a remarkable effort. A countrywide poster campaign demanded that every citizen do their duty and kill as many animals as possible. Sparrows’ nests were destroyed and their eggs smashed, while citizens banging pots and pans would drive them from trees.
China’s ‘Four Pests’ campaign killed more than 1.5 billion rats, 11 million kilos of mosquitoes, 100 million kilograms of flies and a billion sparrows on its first day in 2007. In Shanghai alone, it was estimated that almost 200,000 sparrows died on the first day of hostilities. “No warrior shall be withdrawn,” the People’s Daily wrote, “until the battle is won”. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent what the problem with this was: those billion sparrows hadn’t just been eating grain.
The locusts of China were released from the constraints of a billion predators keeping their numbers down. They tore through the crops of China in vast, relentless devouring clouds. In 1959, an actual expert (ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng) was trying to warn people how bad an idea this all was. But by then it was too late; you can’t just replace a billion sparrows on a whim once you’ve wiped them out.
The great famine that struck China in the years between 1959 and 1962 was caused by a perfect storm of terrible decisions. A Party-mandated shift from traditional subsistence farming to high-value cash crops, destructive new agricultural techniques and the central government appropriating all produce played its part. Incentives that pushed officials at every level to report positive results led to the delusion that, basically, Everything Was Fine.
Estimates of the number of deaths range from 15 million to 30 million, and we don’t even know whether or not 15 million human beings died.
In 2004, the Chinese government ordered the mass extermination of mammals from civet cats to badgers in response to the outbreak of the SARS virus, suggesting that humans’ capacity for learning from their mistakes remains as tenuous as ever.
Eugenics
In the early part of the twentieth century, there was worldwide uptake of the eugenics movement. Thirty-one US states passed compulsory sterilization laws before they were finally repealed in the sixties. Over 60,000 people in mental institutions in the United States had been forcibly sterilized, the majority of them women. And of course in Nazi Germany, you know what happened.
Six Scientists who were Killed by their Own Science
- Jesse William Lazear: American medic Jesse William Lazear proved beyond doubt that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes—by letting one of the disease-carrying mosquitoes bite him. He died, proving his theory right.
- Franz Reichelt: An Austrian French tailor who in 1912 confidently attempted to test his elaborate new parachute suit by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while wearing it he was supposed to use a dummy). Plummeted to his death.
- Daniel Alcides Carrión García: Peruvian medical student Carrión was determined to investigate Carrion’s disease. Of course, it wasn’t called Carrion’s disease then. It got that name af ter he injected himself with blood drawn from the warts of a victim, and died.
- Edwin Katskee: A doctor who in 1936 wanted to know why cocaine—then used as an anesthetic—had negative side effects. Injected himself with a ton of it, spent the night scrawling notes on the walls of his office in increasingly illegible handwriting, then died.
- Carl Wilhelm Scheele: A genius Swedish chemist who discovered many elements—including oxygen, barium and chlorine—but had a habit of tasting each of his new discoveries. Died in 1786 of exposure to substances including lead, hydrofluoric acid and arsenic.
- Clement Vallandigham: A lawyer who pioneered an early kind of forensic science. Defending an accused murderer, he proved that the supposed victim could have accidentally shot himself…by accidentally shooting himself. He died, but his client was found not guilty. In 1897, the eminent British scientist Lord Kelvin predicted that “radio has no future.” Also in 1897, the New York Times praised Hiram Maxim’s invention of the fully automatic machine gun as being one so fearsome that it would stop wars from occurring, calling Maxim guns “peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors” that “because of their devastating effects, have made nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering upon projects of conquest.”
Bad Predictions
In 1902, Kelvin predicted in an interview that transatlantic flight was an impossibility, and that “no balloon and no airplane will ever be practically successful.” The Wright brothers flew their first flight 18 months later. As Orville Wright recalled in a letter from 1917: “When my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible. That we were not alone in this thought is evidenced by the fact that the French Peace Society presented us with medals on account of our invention.”
In 1908, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was a passenger in a demonstration flight piloted by Orville Wright. On the fifth circuit flying around Fort Myer in Virginia, the propeller broke and the plane crashed, killing Selfridge (Wright survived). He became the first person in history to be killed in a plane crash. In 1912, Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, predicted that “the coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.” In 1914, the world went to war.
On October 16, 1929, the eminent Yale economist Irving Fisher predicted that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Eight days later, stock markets around the world crashed, as a bubble of speculation fueled by easily available debt finally burst.
The global economic depression lasted for years; in the wake of the financial crisis, voters in many democracies increasingly turned to populist authoritarian politicians.
In 1932, Albert Einstein predicted that “there is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable.”
In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned home with a deal he had just signed with Adolf Hitler and predicted, “I believe it is peace for our time,” before adding, “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” In 1939, the world went to war.
In 1945, Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the efforts to produce the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, wrote, “If this weapon does not persuade men of the need to put an end to war, nothing that comes out of a laboratory ever will.” Contrary to his hopes—and the hopes of Nobel, Gatling, Maxim and Wright—we still have wars, although at least we haven’t actually had a nuclear war yet (statement correct at time of writing), so Oppenheimer maybe wins this one on points.
In 1966, the eminent designer Richard Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the year 2000, “amid general plenty, politics will simply fade away.”
In 1971, the Russian cosmonauts Georgiy Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov became the first people to die in space, after their Soyuz module decompressed on their return from a space station.
In 1977, Ken Olsen, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, predicted that the computer business would always be niche, saying, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
In 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an unsolicited email plugging his company’s products to around 400 recipients over Arpanet, one of the earliest manifestations of the internet. He had just sent the world’s first spam email. (And according to him, it worked: DEC sold millions of dollars’ worth of machines from their email campaign.)
In 1979, Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford plant in Michigan, became the first person in history to be killed by a robot. In December of 2007, financial commentator Larry Kudlow wrote in the National Review: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimists were wrong. It’s not going to happen… The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.”
In December of 2007, the US economy entered recession. (At the time of writing, Larry Kudlow is currently serving as the director of the National Economic Council of the United States.) In 2008, stock markets around the world crashed as a bubble of speculation fueled by easily available debt finally burst. The global economic recession lasted for years; in the wake of the financial crisis, voters in many democracies increasingly turned to populist authoritarian politicians.
Crypto, Climate Change, and Lead
Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region for 75 years, but that’s about to change. The disease had been lying dormant in the subzero temperatures since the days when the Russian winter was breaking Hitler’s army, just waiting for the time when its frozen cage would melt. In 2016, as the warming world released the bacteria once more, infecting more than 2,000 reindeer before it spilled over into humans. Five years earlier two scientists had predicted that exactly this would happen as climate change grew worse.
Cryptocryptology is the name given to a growing group of digital currencies that aren’t “mined” in the way that gold is. Instead, they’re created by computer code, and are based on something called blockchain technology. The computational power needed to create them in the first place, and process their increasingly complicated transaction logs, is significant. It also sucks up electricity at a crazy rate, both to run the data centers devoted to crypto-mining and to cool them down as they overheat.
Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that don’t have any intrinsic value, and don’t really exist. But the belief among some people that they’re the currency of the future has led to many cryptocurrencies surging in value. So their value has become wildly volatile, depending entirely on the mood of the market.
Cryptocryptology is the latest financial mania, and like most manias has real-world effects. It’s not just Australia reopening a power plant – in rural America, there’s a new gold rush happening. Lured by cheap power and cheap rent and space to build, cryptocurrency firms are investing hundreds of millions creating huge, power-hungry crypto-mines across the US.
Residents of one town where these twenty-first-century prospectors have moved in complain that the around-the-clock roar of the servers is keeping them awake, affecting their health and driving away local wildlife. By the end of 2018, one estimate predicts that Bitcoin mining alone will use as much energy as the entire country of Austria.
Seventeen of the hottest eighteen years on record have occurred since the year 2000. For the first time in our geological epoch, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere crossed the threshold of 410 parts per million in April 2018.
The last time it was this high was during the mid-Pleistocene warm period, around 3.2 million years ago. Sea levels were 60 feet higher than they are today, and that’s because the oceans absorb some of the CO2 emitted by the atmosphere.
The oceans are absorbing all that CO2 and turning more acidic as a result, which has a knock-on effect on marine life. The Great Barrier Reef is dying at an alarming rate, with two years in a row of massive “bleaching” events killing corals across large sections of the reef.
Backed by some woefully bad science, a rapacious desire to make money and the fact that powerful cars are cool and let you travel farther, leaded fuel quickly became the standard around the world.
While some toxins will become less dangerous with time, lead builds up, and it doesn’t break down like other forms of pollution.
Children are especially at risk, as they absorb five times the amount of lead into their bodies as adults. The World Health Organization estimates that hundreds of thousands of people die annually from lead-poisoning illnesses, such as heart disease and stroke.
Thomas Midgley was a chemical and mechanical engineer who played a major role in developing leaded gasoline (tetraethyllead) and some of the first chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), better known in the United States by the brand name Freon; both products were later banned from common use due to their harmful impact on human health and the environment.
In May 2018, it was reported that scientists had detected a sharp rise in chlorofluorocarbon emissions. Somewhere in the world, likely in Asia, someone’s started manufacturing Thomas Midgley’s supposedly banned invention again. It could set the ozone layer’s recovery back by a decade.
Good work on the “learning from our mistakes” front, guys.
Antimicrobial Resistance
Antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines were one of the greatest steps forward of the twentieth century. But they are overused. Every time you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing the chances that one of those microbes will be resistant to it. It’s accelerated evolution, as our actions breed new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs that may bring back old diseases we have eliminated.
The world is running out of effective antibiotics, and drug companies are struggling to find new ones. One estimate suggests that 700,000 people every year die from antimicrobial-resistant diseases.
Space Junk
Maybe our downfall will come because we keep outsourcing our decisions to computer algorithms.
We think that outsourcing our decisions to computers and artificial intelligence will solve our problems. We like to think that these will be more rational than humans; in reality they’re just as likely to amplify all the biases and faulty assumptions we feed into them. The fear here is that if we manage to create an AI that’s far smarter and more capable than humans, we might be mistaken in thinking it’ll be on our side.
When you dump things in orbit, they don’t really go anywhere. It’s not like throwing a potato chip bag out of a car window, to be immediately forgotten about. Space rubbish stays orbiting at roughly the same speed and trajectory as the thing it was thrown out of.
A single collision with the smallest piece of material can be catastrophic, destroying satellites or space stations. And those collisions produce thousands upon thousands more pieces of space junk. This is what Donald Kessler predicted: that eventually space will become so crowded that this process will reach a tipping point.
Source: Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up, Tom Phillips