The Future Isn't What It Used To Be
I’m sixty three years old, give or take a few months. I recall back in the sixties when I was in high school and either pissed off at the world or confused as hell. I knew they were lying to me even then. I just didn’t know how. I was soon be out of high school and the future awaited. A scary bad future they said. This was during the Vietnam war. I was prime meat for the army so my fate was sealed. Worse than that however was that we were all doomed.
The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was published in 1968.
Of all the ridiculous pieces of crap. I didn’t know how stupid it was then and I read it. In it author made some predictions.
(research and list some of the predicitions ...debunk)
the first Earth Day April 22, 1970
failed predicitons.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Oddly enough I don’t recall any of that happening.
That didn’t matter. They kept coming up with new things to be afraid of, and new things to be upset bout.
Violence for example...the world, the US in particular, was supposed to be overcome by violence. Oddly enough the US wasn’t.
Guns...we needed (still do) to control guns.
Oddly enough.. in the real world it’s the opposite “More Guns less Crime.”
Julian Simon might have been the only sane voice in the herd of nay sayers. They called him the DoomSlayer.
"Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way," he says. "Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials - all of them - have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.
and lately theres global warming.
yadda yadda yadda…
The doomsdays that never happened…
and now it’s Glow Bull Warming. Which aint’ happening either.
What’s REALLY happening is
http://www.juliansimon.com/
and
and
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Getting-Better-All-Time/dp/1882577965
consequently...I view the future a bit differently.
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