For some reason, I was doing dishes today and thinking about how dumb humans were to put lead in everything back in the 1900’s despite the fact that we were well aware of the dangers of lead on human physiology. We literally put that shit in our fuel and pumped the exhaust into our air. We put it in utensils. UTENSILS people. Seriously? It had been known for eons practically that lead is poison to the body.
The US obsession with putting lead in shit was very uniquely American. Many European countries had banned lead in their stuff in the first third of the 20th century but the US stuck onto it for some reason.
The lead in gasoline was one of the worst environmental and social bullshit ever made. They didn’t need to use that as an anti knocking agent. But they did since it was more patentable. When asked about possible health and environmental issues it would cause, they said it is the next generation’s problem…
Yeah. That is capitalism. Creating what was a prime mover in the massive crime waves around the world from the 1960s to 90s for short term profit.
The US banned leaded gasoline (at a federal level, states had banned it since the 1920s) in 1996. Austria was the first European country to ban leaded gas, and they did it in 1993. The first country world wide to ban leaded gas was Japan and they did it in 1986.
And the EU didn’t ban leaded gas as a whole until 2000
I am aware. I am an elder millennial and I remember gas pumps in the 90s with leaded and unleaded gasoline. I also remember the PSAs against it.
And its still not entirely banned in the US, AVGAS for small planes is a “low” lead fuel that still contains a decent amount of lead.
Yeah but 100LL is also still legal (and required) in Europe. My comment is specifically talking about automotive gas
And more specifically, I was refuting the very clear anti-american sentiment in the comment above mine. Because leaded fuel was not a “uniquely American problem”
Avgas is the last hold out for that, yes. But piston powered airplanes are becoming rarer and rarer.
True, though they are more common than you think, there’s still thousands of flights daily across the U.S. and where I live its the only mode of transportation in/out of a lot of communities. On thing that’s common though is a mod to allow the planes to run on car gas, 85 or better octane. That helps us and them (much cheaper) and a lot of modern small aircraft are moving to diesel piston engines like the Thielert engines.
I think this prediction will age extremely well if we last that long. That’s a very big “if”.
Technically we’re in the year 12025 already so…
I prefer the true cosmological calendar where the date is counted up from the big bang, making it the year ~4.543 billion of Earth.
There’s no such thing because there’s no specific year there, since it began the whole time and space business (for us at least).
Holocene calendar just adds 10k to the Christian calendar.
But even humanity’s past goes back much further, but cilivilization started about ~12k years ago I guess, the first big cities.
You’re assuming we’ll still be there in 10000bc. For how things are going I wouldn’t bet on it
B.C = before christ
So indeed we were there in 10000 b.c.
Not many micro plastics tho
We actually have the tech to save ourselves in most extinction level events, just not all 8 billion, probably a mere fraction. But enough where we wouldn’t go extinct.
Ofc I said most, there’s a few ELEs that we wouldn’t be able to do shit about with our current level of technology. Like our sun dying, an asteroid impact big enough to strip the atmosphere, gamma ray burst, false vacuum being true etc
Extinction, sure. But once we loose too many people, some industries become impractical. If the supply chain for mineral extraction fails, we will likely fall to a pre industrial level. And with all of easy-to-glean coal, gas, and other petrols already used up, there can never be another industrial revolution.
Could we use biomass and hydro to bootstrap without fossil fuels?
We might have to go smaller scale, but if we have a playbook to follow, we can skip some wasteful false starts
Hydropower was used during the industrial revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower#19th_century
Or that this will be called the Anthropocene at that point.
You’re assuming we’ll still be there in 10000*bc.
Exhibit A for how microplasrics can effect the human body /s
Great science fiction novel from AD 1956. “The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester. Still a great adventure story.
One of the vices of the future is having diseases. Perverted ‘disease birds’ pay to have pseudo-measles and spend some time laying in bed being tended to by hookers dressed as nurses.
It’s not in the actual book, but I’m sure some of these folks would claim to be serious reenactors.
Heh there’s a bit like that in the Culture too. A whole ship fashionably gets the cold because they were bored.
IIRC I’m reasonably sure they all immediately regretted it.
If you don’t want to lose any little hope you may have in humanity, do not look up “bug chasers”
“Heroin chic” has been a thing for decades, and before that people tried to look consumptive.
Nothing new under the sun.
There were probably emo kids in Egypt who carried asps after Cleopatra killed herself.
Sure, but there’s a difference between trying to look strung out for a fashion statement, and literally trying to get AIDS because it’s your kink.
Removed by mod
Pretty optimistic of you to think there will still be humans in 8,000 years.
That’s the neat thing, he’ll be eating microplastics anyway because they’ll still be hanging around from today.
No, after the Grey Goo of '32 microplastics were all consumed by nanomachines. Plastics too. Goo Flu claims millions of lives, though some after recovery report higher IQs post flu.
Many scientists in the 2150s attribute the rise in intelligence after the Goo Flu due to the Flynn Effect and Survivorship Bias – essentially, those who made it into the shelters, tunnels, caves and vaults underground survived, and by definition, they heeded the warnings about the Grey Goo and weren’t stripped apart by the swarms.
It’s tenuous exactly why most of humanity actively embraced armageddon, especially with so much ample evidence that the Goo wasn’t religious in nature and a mechanistic effect of the specious rapid construction program (RCP) of the 2130s.
When did you get your ticket and why did you choose the 2020s to return to, friend?
Not a time traveler, just something I read in a fortune cookie.
I opened a fortune cookie and all it told me was the dictionary definition of capitalism
Edit: I was wrong, it wasn’t just the definition but it definitely wasn’t a fortune either!
