Help me list all of the End of the World Scares that we have survived?

Question

We have been hounded by END OF THE WORLD Scenarios for decades.

I am just over 40 years old.

I have personally "survived" ...

Soviet Global Thermonuclear Threat (half of my life)

Next Ice Age (Gradeschool)

Acid Rain (Junior High)

China Syndrome Nuclear disaster (High School)

Y2K

and now Global Warming.

What have I forgotten?

Answer 1

I guess you can add that you survived Edward.

Answer 2

Think about our successes The Clean Water act ,The Clean Air Act,You mentioned,The Acid Rain thing, The End of the Cold War, these are all things we have taken care of as a Nation . We are  still the U.S.A. we can and will always do what we must to be the best, Global Warming is just another problem we will over come.

Answer 3

How about AIDS, SARS, and Bird Flu.

In the first world war many believed the the use of so many explosives would set fire to the atmosphere and we'd all suffocate.

Here's a bunch of "The end is nigh" predictions (that didn't happen) for you to enjoy.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wr...

Answer 4

Cooties.....Very big in the 60's

Polynesia.....The fear of becoming a Parrot.

Am-nesia.....The fear of becoming an Amway rep.

Tu-nesia.....The fear of having an identical twin you dont          

                     know about.

Answer 5

You forgot Asian Flu and Bird Flu.

Global cooling was a very big deal.  People were more panicky than during the cold war.  It was the front page of most major magazines back then.

>At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."

>C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."

>In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

>Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.

>Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

>In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.

>Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them."

>In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

>Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."

>That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "... somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

Predictions are just that and are rarely correct.  Why we fall for this c**p is beyond me, but I think most humans react well to doomsday scenarios.

They go back even further too:

>In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was "little or no chance" of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

>In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years.

>In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.

The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, there's a 1,000 to 2,500 year supply.  And we know of trillions of barrels of oil in the US alone.

Sorry to be so long on this, but I'm sure if you searched you'd find even more "End of the World Scares."

Enjoy...

Answer 6

global warming is a reality, not a scare

Answer 7

Supposedly the Constitution was torn up several times during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 Administration.

Answer 8

I am a similar age, of the things you list nuclear war was the most likely to be an "End of the world" scenario another you didn't mention is asteroid impact although the odds are long, they have happened before.

Another would be a super volcano, there are a dozen sites around the world that have regular repeat eruptions, Yellowstone is one of these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_volca...

"next ice age" not the 70's media hype, but in the long term this will happen, based on the interglacial periods between the last 4-5 glacial periods we won't go back to a cold period for thousands of years.

"global warming" if you go by the science and not the silly thing that get posted here is not end of the world stuff the IPPC have a 24in sea rise and ~3deg temp rise by the end of the century

Manda "China Syndrome Nuclear disaster"

was the name given to the possibility of a nuclear reactor going into a melt down, the core become so hot it melts through anything until it gets to the earths core, there was a movie by the same name, loosely based on a real incident at three mile island.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_mile_...

Answer 9

You forgot the hole in the Ozone layer, that was going to fry people instantly if they exposed themselves to Sunlight.

The Population Bomb, overpopulation that would lead to mass starvation.

Killer Bees, that would overwhelm the country.

The Ice Age that was going to freeze the Earth.

The super-bug that would mutate from using antibacterial soap.

AIDS that was the next Bubonic Plague.

I'm sure this list is incomplete.

Answer 10

Wow! You're lucky all I have on my age is Y2K and this dramatized Global Warming BS.

Answer 11

People have been confusing their personal death and the end of the world for a long, long time.  Previous posters got most of them from the last 50 or so years, but if you look at any century in history - there are countless others.

The atheists won't like this, but it is easier to fall for a clever end-of-the-world scenario if you don't believe in G-d.

Answer 12

Simply because you think you are infallible does not make it so.  whether you know it or not, you're on a living planet that is being carelessly destroyed by people who don't care and be people who are forced into your way of life as well.  The right thing for good people to do would be to destroy those who don't care.

Answer 13

I prefer to use the 10 ways to destroy the Earth-- as they are more probable ---

http://www.livescience.com/technology/de...

Answer 14

Well.... Nukes really could kill you, although luckily no one's used them since WW2.

The global cooling ice age scare was never backed by very many scientists.

Acid rain was never an "end of the world scare" although it is a real environmental issue.

I don't even know what "China syndrome nuclear disaster" means.  Sorry.

Y2K was never taken seriously as an "end of the world scare."

Global warming has been a known issue half of your life, considering the IPCC has been around for 20 years now.  Perhaps you just didn't hear of it until it became popularized in the last few years.

Global warming is also not an "end of the world" scare exactly.  It's not going to get hotter, and sea levels aren't going to rise, overnight.  It's just going to gradually change the world in some ways that are going to make things hard for us.  That is, if we aren't able to stop it before it's too late.

Answer 15

Do you remember the robotics scare from the 1960s?  Robots would soon be doing everyone's job, creating great masses of unemployed workers.   People were really scared about this kind of modernization for a long time.

Every scare comes to an end eventually, usually after somebody somewhere has made millions.  But after a bit of a lull another comes along to take it's place.

Answer 16

Technically Y2k wasn't the end of the world. it was a computer glitch.

and we only got through that because we GOT TOGETHER AND DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!  HINT HINT

We didn't beat around the bush and debate and debate and debate and come up with silly reasons not to do anything

Answer 17

Yeah well, it's not like we have to BE crazy about it.  What is obvious is that our trees are dying and our earth is definitely running out of natural resources.  If there's anything making the big corporations losing money, its global warming, because they have to pay to use better materials, and if they're not, we hassle them (and we should more).

but for the people who think this is just a "scare," there's nothing wrong with recycling, and taking small steps in your life to create less pollution, and have less trees cut down (so that millions of other animals don't have to lose their home, when all we do is make 50 copies of something when only a couple are needed).

It's only small things that need to be changed, and there's no reason to be "scared" of it.

Global warming is not "the end of the world" it's more like, "you don't want to live in a S****y world, so take care of the earth" thing

Answer 18

You forgot Hilary Clinton becoming President of the US.

Answer 19

What about CFL's killing everyone in a house when they break?    Or terrorists trying to sneak a dirty bomb into the country in a shipping container?   Only one container of every few hundred are checked at all.

Answer 20

Well the sun was going to blow up in 2000...

In 2012 the myahns predicted the end of the world...

In 2049 a comet will hit the earth thus destorying it, or, passing between the earth and the satellites...

Answer 21

http://environmental-science.thesciencep...