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How Many Times Have You Died, and Of What Causes?
Seems like there have been at least half a dozen times we were all going to die since Trump assumed office. Net Neutrality? Pulling out of the Paris Accords climate boondoggle? Etc. But the immediate destruction of the world is hardly new to having Trump as PotUS. I was trying to count all the times I have died and of what causes during my lifetime, but with all the goalpost moving, it can be so hard to keep up.
OccupantCDN’s Ice Free Montana had a video the other day that went through the timeline of when Montana’s glaciers were supposed to all be melted starting with the first prediction of 1941, if I remember correctly. They just removed signs that said they would all be gone next year. (Surprise! They’re still there!) That is hardly the only one of the many, many dire predictions that have had to be moved back because the predictions did not come to fruition.
Global warming? I hear we now have to act in the next twelve years, or we will be beyond the point of no return. Of course, the first time I heard that prediction, I think it expired close to twenty years ago. It is very much like the various Millenarianist sects who keep having to move back the date of the Second Coming. Does anybody remember the Great Disappointment? Of course not, it was before we were born happening on October 22, 1844. But I bet we all remember predicted dates for the Apocalypse that came and went without anything happening other than one religious group’s disappointment.
Hey, remember the end of the Mayan calendar cycle? That was fun.
I’m old enough to have been alive when The Population Bomb was first published. According to that, we were all going to starve in the 1970s and 1980s unless we stopped people from reproducing. It was all very Malthusian. Of course, Old Tom first wrote about the idea in 1798, and we’re still producing more and more and the population has not kept up with production, so the world is much richer per capita than it was in 1798 or 1968.
Then there was nuclear winter. Because of nuclear testing, and if we had a nuclear war, so much particulate matter would get into the upper atmosphere that we would cool down and the Earth would go back into an Ice Age. That was in the 1970s, I believe.
Then there was the fact that a mad cowboy had been elected and had his finger on the nuclear button. We were all going to die because he’d get us into a war. What? No, not George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan, back in the 1980s. Bush came later.
Somewhere along the way, there was Global Warming, especially Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). But then it didn’t happen fast enough and there were cooler periods, so AGW was now supposed to bring on an ice age. For a while, they changed it to Global Weirding, and then to Climate Change. I don’t remember how many changes it went through or how many predicted must-act-before dates whizzed by over the last thirty years.
What else? Y2K was supposed to have major disruptions of computers that would have planes crashing into buildings and probably the end of civilization.
I’m sure I am missing at least two hundred things that were predicted to have killed me by now. How about you? Are you old enough to have died due to the Silent Spring of 1962? Something even before that? What have I missed that you died of, perhaps multiple times?
Published in History
Killer bees. Hole in the ozone layer. Mutated frogs.
The end of Net Neutrality did me in. I mean, what was the point of going on?
Oh, yes. Can’t leave those out. As I said, I probably missed a couple hundred. But those killer bees. Nothing like those movies. They were so smart they could get through protective clothing and kill people.
Oh, and movies like The Day After when Reagan was President in 1983.
I was dead before that so many times that it barely registered.
We all know that having Republicans in the White House cause most of these crises. Besides nearly bringing down the Republic, what did Richard Nixon do to kill us all? Was it just not as bad then? I was alive, but not as politically aware as I was for Reagan.
Endless war with Soviet proxies, leading to nuclear annihilation.
Must have been something with ending the gold standard, too.
I was personally killed by acid rain. Or thought I would be, when they were crying about that when I was in elementary school. Later I learned it was just the trees, and maybe some stone monuments. Then nothing, because the problem seemed to just go away somehow.
Amazing, isn’t it? As we get older, we experience that so often we get jaded.
Actual newspaper headline from when I was eighteen, the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970:
Our Poisoned Planet! Ten Years to Live!
The newspaper was the National Enquirer.
Surprising. They’re better journalists than most. How could they be wrong?
Fire Ants marching inexorably north.
True. But the areas with them seem to have accommodated to them by now.
The killer bees and fire ants remind me that all the honey bees were supposed to be dead by now due to colony collapse disorder. And we’d starve without bees to pollinate things.
Mel was a better journalist than most.
That was the core of the “silent spring” idea, I believe. Now let’s get small. Super Bugs!
Microbes take over the world.
Prey: nano-particles take over the world. This is a twist on the machines taking over the world, with a bottom up instead of top down approach.
Ah, yes, the gray goo.
Then there was the alien AI that first enslaved its creators in its home system. A world-wide powerful AM transmission from Earth awakened the AI to our presence in its neck of the galaxy. Apocalypse for humanity summoned from The Killing Star by…”We Are the World.” Relativistic bombing and computer virus and nanobots, oh, my!
I don’t think that counts. If we throw in every sci-fi scenario, we would all have been dead a billion times over. I think we need to limit ourselves to things that were back by science or pseudo-science and in the popular culture.
Like vaccines causing autism.
Ah, so just plain old asteroids. Which are about to kill us all every few years.
Sure. That will do.
Then there’s all the times scientific studies have told us our diets are killing us; too much red meat, not enough red meat, too much coffee, not enough coffee, too much cholesterol, too many eggs, not enough eggs, too much processed food, etc., etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmzuRXLzqKk
From today’s First Reading and Responsorial Psalm at all Catholic masses in the entire world ….
First Reading: Proverbs 8: 22-31 …
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 8: 4-9 …
And there are some political leaders who challenge the liberal orthodoxy and atheistic ‘religion’ of fake science and innately recognize that greater power exists in this world, created by such greater Power, and that it is called weather.
Alar treated apples. Mercury in tuna. Second hand smoke. So many ways to die.
When was the mutated frogs? Also, how were they supposed to kill us?
Then it turned out that some huge percentage of the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere was coming from two power plants in Canada and acid rain ceased to be a thing. Just like that.
Even as a monogamous, heterosexual, non-drug user there was still a 53.7% chance that I was going to die of AIDS in the late 1980s.
Well, one thing I can say with certainty: It is given unto man once to die, and then the judgment.
(Oh, yes – taxes are also certain.)