By Ross Pomeroy
People are a panicked species – to fear quickly and only to understand it slowly. In a large part of our evolutionary history, this deeply rooted alarm served us well and kept us full of dangers in a wild world. But when people dominated the globe and made the earth more harmless (at least for us), we began to annoy ourselves over increasingly harmless things.
In his 2024 book Fear/Less: Why are her lifelong fears probably unfounded, Professor Wojciech Janicki, who is based in Poland at the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska, reported some of the things that were likely to be feared today. His ultimate point? “Although people have solved a problem according to the problem, it is still generally assumed that disasters are almost inevitable.” It is time to consciously relieve our fears and to deal with threats as challenges and not with reasons for the evaluation and interruption.
Here are four formerly widespread fears, many of which were scattered by innovation:
1st train trips. When the railway trip increased in the 19th century, concerns in the media, scientific literature and popular culture spread that this futuristic form of transport devastates the physical and mental health of passengers. It was claimed that suspicious movements and loud noises at unnatural speeds of 60 miles per hour led to chronic inflammation, impaired vision and disgusting host of other physical complaints. Worse, some people could suffer from “railway neurosis” and temporarily or permanently drive them. Founding for training together with improvements in tracks and locomotives were gradually taken into account by the travelers' concerns.
2. Electric wires. Today, electric wires fade in the background of modern life in large parts of the world, but at the end of the 19th century the residents of New York City looked up to them with fear. Although less than 10 percent of households were connected to the network at that time, the metropolis was one of the first to see an increasing adoption. When the Lineman of Western Union, John Feek, became the mass panic in 1889 in the course of work.
In an article in which the Saga was told in Ieee Xplore, JP Sullivan explained the thinking of the Americans more than a century ago. “They believed that a new technology would improve society, but at the same time it feared that they had no control over the pace and direction of this change … The tension between technological enthusiasm and pessimism led to a profound fear of electricity and the new urban world that created it.”
We know what happened. Electrical security improved and the advantages of the electricity became too great to give it off.
3. 'drown' in the horse murgeon. In the 1890s, residents, civil servants and planners who lived in London and New York lived that their streets would eventually become impassable and their cities would not become trusting due to a building of horse murmurs. The hundreds of thousands of horses cross city blocks to move the freight, and the passengers left millions of pounds fresh and urine every day. The city cleaners stacked and relocated the collected loads to designated places, but the muddy excrement still stacked the streets. When the populations of the cities rose, the mountains of crap too!
The concerns quickly evaporated when car vehicles and electric trams arrived on site. “You can't find a kind of paradox? A car with a combustion engine was a solution, no problem!” Janicki commented.
4. Global population. From Paul Ehrlich in 1968 to Thomas Malthus 170 years ago to Confucius in the 6th century BC. BC many marked upcoming and catastrophic accidents, often through widespread famine. So far, they have always been wrong on a global level. Today, around 8.1 billion people live on earth, and global poverty continues, if not as soon as possible. Eating too many calories is a more common problem to eat than too little. The growth of man in the human population will probably stop later in this century, but not because of the mass of death – rather due to higher living standards and voluntary contraception.
This article was originally published by Realclearscience and provided via Realclearwire.
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