This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
“Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?”
Yeah, I remember. And I’m sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that’s a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don’t talk about acid rain because there isn’t any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don’t talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there’s nothing to notice. But don’t be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it’s time to do that thing again and make sure that we don’t kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
‘the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes’ what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so
also the exploding appendix
there’s an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:
-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don’t run behind them but rather in front of them. It’s like putting the power cables *over* a camera’s lens
-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn’t a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.
the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.
Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.
Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.
And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.
Look, if you’re starving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and suddenly someone is like ‘oh I have tons of food and it just happens to be meat do you want some lol’ you CANNOT act surprised when it’s people. You simply CANNOT.
There are times and places where it is realistic to expect NOT to be served people. For example, in a pie shop underneath a barber shop. THEN you can be all 'OH GOD IT’S PEOPLE.’
If you are in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and are suddenly served a really good meat pie, you have to know it’s people. Do you see any cows? No, they all apocalypsed. It’s your neighbor.
If you’re served food in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ask yourself these questions first:
Do I trust the person feeding me?
Is this meat fresh, and if so, have there been any livestock non-apocalypsed recently?
Have I seen Kevin within the past week?
Am I willing to commit the penultimate culinary taboo? (The ultimate culinary taboo is putting pineapple on pizza, a crime I regularly commit)
