“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
Happy Smallpox Eradication Day
I'm developing a theory that humans are capable of learning and understanding massive and extremely important information, but also just..."flavor of the week" when it comes to beliefs.
And unfortunately, human accomplishments tend to fall under "beliefs"
Which can change by whim.
I suppose that sort of flexibility is healthy, on an evolutionary basis.
"The watering hole is safe" is a fact until the tigers come and then no matter how much history you have with that watering hole, the fact that the tigers are there now means the water isn't safe anymore.
It might be worthwhile to revisit the watering hole again later to see if the danger is still present
If the tigers leave and don't come back, then it kinda feels like the watering hole was always safe... except that one time.
That flexibility becomes a problem, though, when it comes to stuff like Y2K and the ozone layer.
I still remember both of these as I actually lived through them. The ozone especially.
I remember thinking that I was going to see the end of humanity in my lifetime because we were gonna be too stupid to actually get our collective shit together and figure out how to fix the ozone layer
Some years back, I remembered and looked and figured out that like, yeah, we fixed it.
And now.... now it's climate change.
I actually got to have a hand in that one.
I helped electrify ships in Norway and saved one company $5.2 million just by fixing their communication equipment in a week. Then I went on to do at least 5x more over the next 10 months
Not just money. I stopped so much diesel from being used that the temperature over Norway that year went DOWN.
It's one of my biggest claims to fame. I altered the earth's climate. By myself.
My reward? My boss was a racist piece of shit to me and overworked and badgered and belittled me so hard that I got physically sick and had to leave the INDUSTRY.
So instead of this being the timeline where "that black trans girl showed the world how to save itself and all industrial businesses noticed that they could save the world AND save themselves money at the same time"
This is now "the timeline where there was a weird anomaly in the climate data exactly once and actually things went back to being just as bad as they were soon after"
We COULD fix the climate.
It literally wouldn't be hard.
The people in charge
Don't
Want to.
