Discovery of the Higgs Bosen. People thought it would trigger the end of existence.

Maybe it did and that’s why we’re in hell

Nobody I’d trust to vote or drive a car believed that.

The ozone layer hole. Managed to barely dodge that one, just to have fossil fuels eat all the climate benefits that brought us.

This was a problem. We just acted to ban CFCs, which solved the problem. Now the ozone hole is recovering. I wouldn’t say it turned out not to be a problem though. The human race just had the brains and corporation to come together and deal with it.

The human race just had the brains and corporation to come together and deal with it.

Why does that sound like such an absurd and faraway fantasy nowadays

Because it is I think. Welcome back to the Dark Ages, population: everyone, torches provided, critical thinking not included.

This is like a runner lamenting how they lossed at the Olympics saying, “how could this have happened? I was the star runner of my third grade class!”

It’s more like being frustrated how things can be so fucked up.

You missed the point. CFCs were mostly manufactured by a tiny number of manufacturers in a few specific industries. Things like refrigerants, spray cans, etc. Governments could easily regulate the handful of CFC producers. Alternative products were quickly found that didn’t require people to make major changes in their lives.

The climate change problem is a completely different animal. Billions of vehicles and fossil dependent supply chains sustain the lives of most of the human race. It’s taken decades of investment to even develop alternatives for these, let alone completely switching the fleets over. Plus electricity generation. Plus heating. Plus emissions from agriculture and land use. And on and on. Fossil fuels are not just some minor industrial compounds we can phase out and replace. We built an entire civilization around them. And that system is what’s currently keeping everyone alive.

We as a species are nature’s ultimate pyromaniacs, and we’ve been tasked with the problem of solving the global coordination problem of the regulation of fire itself.

Looking at the ozone situation and lamenting we haven’t solved climate change is like someone lamenting they can’t single-handedly take on a million man army, even though their combat prowess was proven when they stepped on an ant.

People just lump both problems into the category of “global environmental issues” and assume they’re even in the same universe of difficulty.

It’s not out of the woods just yet!

The ozone layer hole.

Managed to barely dodge that one

And now it’s looking like all the LEO satellites they want to launch will recreate that problem.

Dang boomer, prompt said 15 not 50

Ebooks for the book industry

Hmm good one.

Y2K

Oh shit, what year did you just say it was?

People really gloss over that there was a lot of work done to make sure y2k wouldn’t be a disaster. It wasn’t exactly a hoax, it was averted

Same with almost everything in this thread.

The news stories blew the issue way out of proportion. There were claims that anything with a computer in it would stop working at midnight. Cars would crash, planes would fall out of the sky, etc. Y2K was really just a finance and IT problem. The fact is most electronic devices of the time, even ones with a clock, didn’t know what the year was and couldn’t be effected by a short-sighted engineering problem.

I guess that’s true

My friend told me there was a shit ton of work done to find and fix every instance if the bug, and they managed to do it, which is why things kept going smoothly.

I’ve also heard that in some places virtually nothing was done and no problems occurred anyway.

There was a vast amount of work that went into mitigating it so thinking it was a whole noise about nothing is disingenuous.

Human cloning becoming common. That would be around the time Dolly the sheep died IIRC.

That was 1997

So about 15 years ago? Right?

Dolly was born in 1996. She died in 2003

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

I think I may be from a different timeline or something, I swear I had 97 in my head and looked it to be sure… Maybe I’m just losing my mind. (Although I was going for birth)

So like 10 years ago then, not too far off

It might be very country specific. But gambling houses.

They started to proliferate in my country around 10 years ago, and they said they were going to be the end of our youth. I, myself, went to a lot of actions to stop them.

We failed to stop them.

And 10 years after… Nothing happened. There are no mesurable increase in social problems due to the massive increase in gambling I was told it was going to happen. Also the houses themselves are always empty, people gamble mostly online anyway. But they put so much pressure on us to stop the opening of the physical buildings and cause rhe closure of the ones already opened.

I’m in principle against them still. Just because I don’t like people making money out of people addicted to gambling. But I’m also kind of mad that I spent to much time, effort, and even got sued for what we tried to do to stop them, just for them not really being as much as a threat as I was told they were. And my efforts would have been much better spent elsewhere.

At least I learned a very valuable lesson.

Is it possible you were successful?

What was the lesson?

None of the objectives were met.

We tried so hard and still were unable to stop any opening, cause any closure or push the legislative changes we wanted (limiting the amount of gambling houses that could be opened). They just opened as many houses as they liked.

My lesson was to not follow anything blindly even if it was said by people I respect. Always analyze by myself and be skeptical of everything.

Gambling online is a hidden problem. Idk gambling is insane, I’m happy I don’t have the money for it.

For the opposite result… Please observe Australia.

That my job is too easy. I having too much time to play video games, reading, travelling, watching TV, dating.

That my job pays too good. I having so much money that I not knowing what to buy.

That AI is too well developed and be morally used that I having nothing to do. (Well it kind of is given how easily I could be unemployed)

There are some that were fixed, but fixed with great effort. The hole in the ozone layer for example.

My final answer will be overpopulation. Personally though I think the population should be about 1 billion just so I don’t feel quite as much existential dread at my own insignificance.

The hole in the ozone layer for example.

I doubt your doubt.

TV was becoming too good, it was becoming impossible to keep up with all the great stuff coming out. Good thing we managed to avert that, now theres maybe 1 good season of tv every year.

1. Obesity pandemic

Ever since Ozempic came on the market, it seems like we’re slowly getting a handle on it.

2. Overpopulation in Africa/Asia

Automation is causing them to stop having children as more jobs require higher education and there’s less jobs around altogether.

3. Poverty in Africa/Asia

Related to overpopulation. China has lifted itself up completely.
India is also doing better every year.
Famines in African nations have severely been reduced these days and all of them are now war related.

[edit]

I’m getting some downvotes.
Is anything wrong here?

India’s gradual rise out of poverty is truly impressive.

I mean Iv’ve never been there, but I’ve been hearing good things.

I have not heard one good thing about India. Please share. As far as I can tell only China has blossomed and it’s incredibly striking. India? … I guess capitalism just doesn’t work. Let’s check back in maybe… 100 years? How long does it take for a capitalist nation to build itself up? 500 years?

How long does it take for a capitalist nation to build itself up?

Idk, look at development in Japan or Korea… Not saying that the culture in India is similar… at all… but capitalism doesn’t seem to be there blocker here.

to me those 3 all seems like valid problems still.

obesity may be solved in a few decades but is still ongoing.

overpopulation in india etc is still a big issue combined with poverty…

a large part of china(mainland) is still suffering in great poverty. places like shanghai/beijing are a very small minority number wise.

Everything’s wrong on your list my dude.

Down votes probably because they’re less of a problem than expected they would be 15 years ago but still problematic. Very large regions in Africa/Asia still deal with overpopulation and poverty although India and China have made some massive progress in the last 15 years. For semaglutide it’s still early days, nobody expected there to be an actual general drug against obesity but more long term studies are still needed.

Legalizing weed was supposed to create a bunch of new addicts and turn our towns into slums. Turned out just fine.

Good one

Similarly, legalizing gay marriage was supposed to usher in waves of people wanting to marry animals or something.

This is going back a bit longer than 15 years but the myth of the Population Bomb was pretty fucking wrong.

It predicted the mass starvation of hundreds of millions of people due yo food production not keeping up with population growth in the 1970s.

This was averted by mass production of fertilizer through fossil fuels.

I’m sure that won’t come back to bite us in the ass.

Certainly not dangerous to have massive monocultures what could easily be wiped out by disease or heat waves. I’m sure all those people will be able to keep living when we aren’t making as much fertilizer with the destruction of our economies.

We are producing about four times as much food as we consume.

Solar panels wind turbines and nuclear energy have proven to solve all of our issues if we actually put effort into implementing them.

Humanity destroying the entire planet would happen even without food scarcity. Every problem we’ve been presented with has had a solution, but we just didn’t implement it.

Well, we haven’t reached the peak yet, tho. Afaik global population is going to peak at around 10 billion people somewhere in the 60s. We will see how much land climate change will render unusable for farming until then as well. So a food shortage is still not completely off the table, I think. Well, at least if we continue to use most of the crops to feed livestock, and not us humans directly.

And if not food, but access to enough fresh water willl probably be a huge issue in the future.

That was avoided by “the green revolution” i.e. new ways of producing fertilizers. It just kicked the can down the road and made everything worse honestly.

Climate change. We all thought we were gonna have to cut back on consumption, use less fossil fuels, and change our infrastructure entirely to renewable energy.

Thankfully it’s not a problem anymore at all. Our wise leaders just decided to stop talking about it and instead just decided we’d speed the process up, burn fossil fuels for glorified chat bots while draining our fresh water resources.

Thankfully it’s not a problem anymore. Because a problem would imply it’s something that has a solution. We’re far past that point. We’re essentially watching this generation of humanity committing a mass global genocide of the upcoming generations.

Problem solved.

We were all panicking a bit about this one. Glad it turned out to be nonsense. Full steam ahead–er… full oil burn everything!

Don’t worry places like the Himalayas are only warming five times faster than the global average leading to apocalyptic mudslides that killed 1000 people in Nepal.

Climate change. We all thought we were gonna have to cut back on consumption, use less fossil fuels, and change our infrastructure entirely to renewable energy.

I feel like we were expecting this because we were expecting someone to be our parent and force us to make the changes, when in fact nobody is externally forcing us to stay on a safe climate path, and we are stuck waiting for our own societal self-discipline.

You say we, like there is anything that any amount of reusable tote bags and driving less could have done. The damage being done to our climate is primarily being done at a corporate and industrial level. People hate hearing how Capitalism is the bad guy, but profits kept being put over environmentalism. If your company wants to be competitive with companies that don’t give a shit, your options are to fight the federal government to implement regulations (expensive and time consuming), or to simply also stop giving a fuck (great next quarter, very easy).

In general, yes, the western world was under the false assumption that the leaders it had were, at the very least, aligned in the interest of self preservation. Many are still living with this false belief today.

I think it’s less about societal self discipline though; and more about the incompatibility of the societal hierarchy with working to solve the problem of climate change. The contradictions between the ruling and working class are in conflict when it comes to the priority of climate change. Climate change is an opportunity for further wealth concentration for the ruling class of our society; and that same ruling class has “drank their own Koolaid” in the idea of American and Western exceptionalism.

Capitalism is incapable of addressing the problems of climate change. It’s like trying to put out a fire and bringing a bulldozer instead of a firetruck.

I’ll never forget when the U.S. state of North Carolina made a policy disallowing any government official or documentation to reference or acknowledge the existence of climate change. It was their response to a state study noting the effect of rising sea levels on their coastal towns.

Convicted Criminal Florida Senator Rick Scott did that when he was the Convicted Criminal Governor of Florida. I believe that he was the first to pull that nonsense, and then everyone else started copying him.

Did I mention that he’s a Convicted Criminal? I like to remind people that Rick Scott is a Convicted Criminal as often as possible, because Convicted Criminal Florida Senator Rick Scott HATES when anyone mentions that Rick Scott is a Convicted Criminal.

You missed the point. And you spent way too much effort to make it seem like a tongue-in-cheek answer.

What solution would you propose that could power the whole infrastructure humanity has built?

Sure. I’m not an expert and I’m only a single person. But I am smart enough to look and see what is working.

China is reaching renewable energy power surplus. Meaning their production of solar panels, windmills, nuclear power, etc is reaching a point at which it will exceed the power consumption of their entire country.

This is in “energy potential”. Meaning, it includes the production of renewable energy products, their energy production over their lifetime, and accounting for grown in demand over that time period. It’s a little bit different than saying that they are running on entirely renewable energy. They are not. They are unfortunately being forced to burn more coal right now due to the Iran war. A lot of their production of renewable energy is sold outside of China. I wanted to clarify though, since this is an important distinction.

The point being. China, has gone from a preindustrial peasant society post WW2, victims of a genocide, on the level of the Holocaust, from the Japanese fascist; to, now, being the first country in the world that is capable of replacing their entire energy production with renewable energy.

Whatever China is doing. We need to learn FROM THAT and quickly. We need to be mimicking their economic planning, at the very least, around the control of natural resources and energy production. Because there is no amount of cold war 2 propaganda that should overpower the threat of mass climate based genocide.

We don’t have to be “pro China”, we don’t have to “be exactly like China”. But we are currently pretending that there is not a major world power that IS planning for and capable of running a modern and cutting edge technological society that is capable of producing energy almost entirely without greenhouse gas production.

We don’t need to pretend there is some “future silicon valley tech” that will save us. There is literally already an example to follow.

If every country was producing renewable energy as China currently is, the world would have literally removed its dependence on fossil fuels.

Edit: Renewable Energy production is projected to exceed Chinas entire energy consumption by 2033 currently. Their industry is growing renewable production at 4x the rate that their domestic consumption is growing.

Acidic rain.

I don’t remember any of the specifics anymore but it boils down to: Trees and plants died in masses, scientists and the general population got together and we changed what caused it.

Good one. Although was more before the millenium afaik

We may have to go back to having it for a while though to put a break on climate change. For all the bad that acid rain caused, at least it cooled the world