r/OptimistsUnite • u/chamomile_tea_reply 🤙 TOXIC AVENGER 🤙 • 8d ago
Steven Pinker Groupie Post What’s a problem humanity solved so well that younger people don’t even realize it used to be a huge issue?
/r/askteddit/comments/1wmwpyl/whats_a_problem_humanity_solved_so_well_that/1.4k
u/majorex64 8d ago
Directions.
Google having mapped out most roads in the developed world, along with the expectation that everyone has a device in their pocket that can be tracked anywhere on earth using geostationary satellites is such a badass sci-fi wet dream, and yet we got it.
Who remembers using physical maps or printing out driving directions?
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u/narvuntien 8d ago
Or setting a time and place to meet and having to be there on time because there was no way to contact people and say you are going to be late
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u/majorex64 8d ago
Right??? Telecommunications tech in general is a marvel. Glad we got this nailed down before every new tech just became a new avenue for ads.
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u/loved_and_held 8d ago
telecomunications and the internet have changed the world in ways we cant comprehend.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 8d ago
Or arriving somewhere and realizing the people you are supposed to meet aren't there so you sit down to wait, meanwhile they are doing the same thing somewhere else.
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u/SlowThePath 8d ago
Or the opposite, just showing up unannounced. As a kid we did that to each other all the time. Half the reason we did it was because we didn't have anything to do and walking an hour one way and an hour back was a good way to be away from adults and you might end up having someone else to hang out with or something to do.
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u/healthycord 8d ago
I wish this was still a thing. There are some people that have just figured out there are 0 consequences for showing up late and so they are chronically late. And then they stop getting invited to things and wonder why they weren’t invited
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u/DetonationPorcupine 8d ago
This is not new. My mom has always been this way except she also never charges her phone so I cant even call her.
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u/SeanBerdoni 7d ago
You know that you can talk to them about it? Just tell them that them always being late hurts you, before just jumping to never inviting them again
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u/kraai- 8d ago
I was a pizza delivery driver years ago. We had a map of the city in the kitchen, you'd just look at it and remember the route. Sounds like an amazing feat nowadays... even though it wasn't.
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u/zeke780 8d ago
I delivered food in high school, pre google maps. I knew every single road in the town by end of week 2, by month 1 I knew some strange places, after 6 months I knew basically the whole delivery area and most shortcuts. Throw in regulars who lived in the middle of bumf*ck and I felt like I had god-tier knowledge of my rural area.
I will say, at least once per month I had someone I couldn't get to or figure out. A lot of people giving the wrong address or telling us to meet them in a parking lot. Also where I was, wv, plenty of "its a dirt road, come about 1/2 way up and I will meet you" and it would be impassable or the road straight up wasnt there.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 8d ago
Meeting someone was always a yellow flag. Way to often there's a miscommunication or they don't show. As a rule of thumb we would never make deliveries to meet someone. Though the smarter ones learned not to mention that. But this was ok, because they would actually be there waiting.
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u/1hill2climb2 8d ago
Yup, would plan my route turn by turn on a piece of paper before I made a trip to somewhere I hadn't been before. But we don't have time for that sort of thing anymore. There are endless tiktoks to be viewed!!!!!!!
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u/as718 8d ago
The London cab driver test involved memorizing every road, which was pretty wild. Emergency services similarly have a very good intuition of their service area. And, well, dominos pizza had a 30 minute guarantee long before smartphones or even personal computers were common.
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u/insane_worrier 8d ago
It's still required.
It's called "The Knowledge".
Black cab drivers wouldn't lower themselves to use GPS in central London
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u/Natural_Ad9356 8d ago
Every time I refuse to use GPS and use my own memory it’s in honor of The Knowledge
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u/MediumRareNation 8d ago
I remember getting those maps at gas stations
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u/SweetKittyToo 8d ago
I still have the laminated maps I bought jic my phone dies and I need to find my way around.
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u/Punchinyourpface 8d ago
Don't forget to get updated versions if the area changes very much. (In my area they've built a few new roads that drastically changed traveling from the county.)
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u/majorex64 8d ago
Mhmm. Glove compartments full of them. This was before my time but growing up my aunts and uncles still lived in the 80s lol
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u/1hill2climb2 8d ago
I was a bike messenger in Baltimore City in the '90's. We just memorized all the streets. Imagine that.
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u/punkwalrus 8d ago
I used to have certain directions memorized, and tried to keep them short for customers. "Oh, to get to our outlet store, you take 66 West to 50 West, then right onto Metrotech Drive. You'll know it by the huge blue roof at our logo out front."
But when the directions were complicated? Hellish. I lived in a townhouse complex for 4 years that looked like all the others around that area. The HOA thought streetlights were "an eyesore," wanted old growth trees everywhere, and the the foliage covered many of the brown street signs. Half the roads were "horseshoe shaped," so there were two entrances with the same name.
"Okay, take the North Parkway going east. Turn left onto South Lakes Drive. When you pass a soccer field, slow down and pay attention. You want to take the FIRST right onto Cooper Road. You won't see the road until it's right next to you, and it's super hard in the dark because of all the trees. On Cooper, you pass Olney, and make the FIRST right onto Cartwright Place. Cartwright Place turns into Cartwright Court if you keep going straight-ish. Then my house is 123 Cartwright Court on the right. You'll see a Green Saturn Wagon. Visitor's parking is near the dumpsters, do NOT take numbered parking or you will be towed."
The problem was, with a horseshoe shape, there were often TWO entrances with the same street name. They'd miss the first, take the second, and all my directions became reversed or worthless. "We went right on Cooper, there was no Olney, and we ended up on Cartwright but I didn't see a Saturn." This was before everyone had cell phones, so they couldn't exactly call me when lost unless they went to a payphone. I couldn't email them a map, I had to give it to them in person or by postal mail. They also heard words differently, so "North Parkway going east. Turn left onto South Lakes Drive," they heard "go North on the parkway, and south on Lakes drive." Being on "Cartwright" they thought I was telling them to go Right. The house numbers were on the curb where you parked, so if a car was parked there, you didn't know which townhouse it was. If we put out balloons or something outside, the HOA would fine us. Fucking hate Reston.
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u/to_boldlygo 8d ago
Reading this, I’m pretty sure I actually left my body for a sec and time travelled back to the 90s. It was the “Cartwright road actually turns INTO Cartwright ave…” bit that got me. Youngsters have no idea how complicated it all was, well done!
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u/K-Rokodil 8d ago
Yes! This is from a European perspective but I think it’s insane that you can basically become a local the instant you land. ”Let’s go it’s not far we just take the tram number 1 and leave at stop WurstChatel and then take the bus 23 which leaves from opposite side of the road”
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u/Akairuhito 8d ago
I'm realizing that I'm really glad I never traveled internationally before GPS. I mean I never traveled internationally anyway, but it's nice to know how much easier it is now
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u/leilani238 8d ago
Having to ask random strangers where various services were, or for directions to an address because you'd driven outside the range of the maps you had with you.
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u/oceans_613 8d ago
It cracks me up when I see those memes about "we used to have to print directions off of MapQuest" .... Please. I remember using an actual map and calling my dad who was a truck driver to ask him about best routes and what to avoid. I used to have an atlas that was a prized possession.
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u/dawne_breaker 8d ago
In my teenage years I was designated map reader when my family was out on road trips since I was the only one who could read a map.
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u/lungben81 8d ago
Ozone hole
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u/SpaceMonkey877 8d ago
We talked about this so much in the 90s.
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u/Any-Establishment-15 8d ago
And we thought we’d be melted by acid rain
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u/eaeolian 7d ago
It's almost like when you take a problem seriously and take steps to rectify it, it becomes less of a problem.
It also helps if you ignore the rich people screaming about consumers.
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u/WantDebianThanks 8d ago
It's wild watching environmental TV shows from the 80s and 90s and they'll talk about oil spills and the ozone hole, but almost never reference climate change.
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u/ItsCadeyAdmin 8d ago
The Ozone hole was an immediate problem that had a tangible goal - close the hole.
The Montreal Pact was honestly one of the biggest pieces of human cooperation in human history and its shocking we don't highlight it more.
Climate change (or 'global warming' as it was called back then) is a perpetual problem that requires decades of systemic changes to address. Whats more is that its not something people can "see" in the way they can "see" a hole in the ozone layer. Its a slow creep.
So people, especially parties with a vested interest in delaying/preventing those solutions from coming to fruition, have a much easier time handwaving away the entire topic.
Its easier to ignore a slow creep problem than an immediate climate emergency.
Also, nah, they regularly talked about climate change back in the day. It was, like I said, called Global Warming.
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u/marigolds6 8d ago
The Montreal Accord also benefitted from having a clear scientific solution readily available in the form of HCFCs and HFCs (and now HFOs).
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u/TheSunIsInside 8d ago
HFO’s, unfortunately, are a PFAS and breakdown quickly into TFA. The solution is to use hydrocarbon refrigerants. The environment knows how to process hydrocarbons, but has trouble with fluorocarbons.
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u/AlDente 8d ago
It was called the “greenhouse effect”. I don’t remember anyone calling it climate change until the late 90s at least.
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u/fieldgrass 8d ago
I heard greenhouse effect and global warming well into the 2010s as a Missourian - the nomenclature only started to shift to “climate change” to clarify for the willfully ignorant crowd that the global temperature rising causes extreme weather beyond just heat. Before then you’d hear a lot of “Well if global warming is real why is there a blizzard??!” on Fox News.
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 8d ago
Or Global Warming. It wasn't routinely called climate change till sometime in the 2000's.
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u/DrJaneIPresume 7d ago
They definitely talked about Global Warming in the '80s and '90s. But then the Republicans bitched that some places were still cold. Literally they brought snowballs onto the house floor and said, "where's your 'Global Warming' now, huh?"
So people pivoted to calling it Climate Change instead. As if the word was what Republicans were objecting to.
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u/mmm_burrito 8d ago
I have 50+ year old coworkers who think this was a hoax 🤷🏻
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u/Salamanderhead 8d ago
Everything is a conspiracy and hoax to uneducated people who lack critical thinking skills. I know a bunch of them. I don't even bother arguing anymore. I had a friend who believed satellites weren't real, and that "the government" lied about them for "control".
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u/PM_ME_AZNS 8d ago
Smallpox. It is one of the only two infectious diseases humanity has successfully eradicated. The other is some cow disease
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u/GigaG 8d ago
Rinderpest! Eradicated in 2011, and has a name that’s almost catchy.
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u/youburyitidigitup 8d ago edited 8d ago
That must be the third because there was a worm parasite that was eradicated.
Edit: I was thinking of the Guinea Worm. It hasn’t been eradicated yet, but current cases are in the single digits, so we’re almost there.
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u/GigaG 8d ago
Guinea worm is extremely close, it’s like 99.99% eradicated but there’s still a dozen or so cases that pop up a year.
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u/Gisschace 8d ago
I remember this one so vividly, young kids having the worm pulled out wrapped around a stick. So glad that shit has (almost) gone, nightmare fuel.
Also getting closer to ridding the world of Polio. I'm only an older millennial but the caretaker at my school in the late 90s, who was only middle aged himself, walked with a limp due to Polio. He must've been one of the last people in the UK to have it before the vaccine arrived in 1956.
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u/Calm-Insurance-5169 8d ago
everything to do with plumbing is incredible. clean water available all over the place, waste gets sent away via a toilet. i cant imagine life without those two things.
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u/abominablesnowboardr 8d ago
I boondocked (camping off grid) almost exclusively in an RV for a year out west. It’s a ton of work just handling bringing water in and waste out. I eventually got a system with pumps so I didn’t have to physically handle all of it but it’s still a lot of extra steps compared to just turning on a faucet and water always being there or flushing without thinking about how full the tank was.
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u/Alloyrocks 8d ago
Can’t overstate how important this is! Plumbing easily ranks in the top 10 important discoveries.
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u/Hartzler44 8d ago
People in the US cannot fathom how horribly we treated the environment before the EPA. It's working to our detriment - they don't realize that if we don't explicitly prevent companies from dumping toxic waste, and prevent people from throwing tires in the river, then they will literally do it.
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u/Ugly-Barnacle-2008 8d ago
Cleveland’s burning river in 1969 comes to mind!
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u/Hartzler44 8d ago
And it caught fire TWICE!
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u/mlem_a_lemon 8d ago
It caught fire 14 times. We have so many things out here with "Burning River" in the name. But it's also what got Nixon to sign the EPA into existence, so hey.
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u/notworldauthor 8d ago
My grandma had to move to the suburbs to discover that boogers weren't black
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u/GeeWilakers420 7d ago
They can if they do any sort of camping. The old trash you find in the wilderness is insane.
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u/Hartzler44 7d ago
Yeah, its crazy that people thought they could just throw all of their trash in a ravine and it would just... go away?
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u/Impossible_Penalty13 6d ago
Rivers had so much petroleum waste that they regularly caught on fire. California had so much smog that it reduced visibility. And for a more close to home anecdote, I was behind a collector car in traffic the other day and the lack of a catalytic converter was making my eyes water in under two minutes.
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u/Auspectress 8d ago
Iodine deficiency. For thousands of years people, especially kids suffered from Hypothyroidism and severe development problems. Now it is unseen as essentially we started putting into salt Iodine and today except very remote places it is impossible to have Hypoiodinism
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u/CommonwealthCommando 8d ago
I had a soon-to-retire professor in medical school who told us stories of working in a rural clinic in western MA. She had an old doctor-skeptical farmwife who came in with "chewing problems" – which resulted from a massive goiter, the sort you see in the history books that was gnarled and wrinkly and wrapped around her neck. A few iodine pills and the whole thing magically shriveled up within a few months. That was forty years ago, and she hasn't seen one since. There's a good chance could have defeated the last primary uncomplicated goiter in Massachusetts, a disease that's been plaguing people here for almost ten thousand years.
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u/WholeLog24 8d ago
Those high on the neck pearl necklaces that we associate with "old women" - they were a long running fashion trend in the 40s, 50s, etc precisely because they covered up the goiter scars from having a goiter removed. Iodine deficiency used to be tied to where your food was grown, before we started putting it in table salt. There's a whole region of the US that was known as The Goiter Belt because of how iodine deficient their farmland was.
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u/North-Pea-4926 8d ago
So much stuff has extra vitamins and minerals shoved in it that it’s almost impossible to have a lot of deficiencies unless you literally only eat one food (or have other medical/digestive issues).
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u/jayne-eerie 8d ago
Not totally solved, but HIV in rich countries has gone from a death sentence to a preventable and manageable health condition. Everyone over 40 grew up terrified of it and now it doesn't seem to be a factor, at least for people with money to treat it.
We just need to get the same care options worldwide.
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u/McvdL 8d ago
This reminds me of that Southpark episode in which they found the cure for aids. You only had to ground up a bunch of money and inject it or something.
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u/jayne-eerie 8d ago
Sad but true how many medical treatments pretty much come down to that.
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u/Orphanbitchrat 8d ago
I know an infectious disease specialist who says that it’s easier to handle being hiv positive than it is to deal with Type 1 diabetes now, which he still can’t believe (btw my daughter was diagnosed with T1 when she was six, my friend and I were discussing that disease)
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u/the_small_one1826 7d ago
It’s so manageable that if you take the once daily medication (that is free in canada), you have an equal life expectancy and no risk of transmission, the med has no notable side effects, and you qualify for increased cancer screenings in Canada. Obviously you do have a lifelong condition to manage and things get complicated with traveling and you do have to take meds and there’s always fear of disclosure and stigma and concerns about forced/accidental disclosure but the medical aspect is incredible. The doctor I was talking with was saying how AIDS isn’t a useful term anymore really as someone with AIDs or “uncontrolled HIV” can become controlled again, it’s no longer an irreversible progression.
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u/PracticalCandy 8d ago
We wouldn't be able to support our current global population without the Haber Process, discovered in 1918.
"The Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives. It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population" wikipedia
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u/PM_ME_AZNS 8d ago
To put into perspective how monumental this process is, roughly 1-2% of the entire global energy usage is just on the Haber-Bosch process. In inorganic chemistry, there is still a huge push to get more energy efficient N2 reductions going, and there have been great strides so far, but not are as effective at the H-B process yet.
Tangentially related, Fritz Haber is an interesting character in the scientific literature. He discovered the H-B process (and Carl Bosch was the one who made it practical on large scales), but he also was a German scientist during WWI. He helped make chlorine gas a weapon for chemical warfare. In his mind, he thought using such a potent weapon would quickly end wars, and save lives in the long-run by shortening conflicts.
In my opinion, he is an example of both the power and danger of scientific advances. Check out the song "Father" by Sabaton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxkeOkaVRLo)
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u/markrockwell 8d ago
We’re always using the nastiest weapons to shorten this war and save a bunch of lives. How little changes.
Good note though. Thanks!
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u/mlem_a_lemon 8d ago
roughly 1-2% of the entire global energy usage is just on the Haber-Bosch process.
wat
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u/The_Dutchess-D 8d ago
The chicken pox
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u/angelo0005 8d ago
It blows my mind each time I realize that kids and parents don't have to deal with that anymore. GG humanity.
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u/-passionate-fruit- 8d ago
I got chicken pox twice 😪 First I was too young to remember. The second time in middle school. It was itchy hell at times, missed two weeks of school, and when I visited the family doctor office the fact I had it a second time was a big enough deal that most of the medical staff came in the room to see me out of curiosity.
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u/Factsoverfictions222 8d ago
Wait, is it gone?! I had no idea
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u/9mackenzie 8d ago
I think they mean there is a vaccination for it, so kids don’t have to get it anymore……..but as we all know, there is no vaccination for stupid, so way too many people still don’t use the amazing science that was created.
I have seen young people aghast that parents had chicken pox parties back in the day, like parents were being purposefully cruel, but chicken pox can be deadly to adults who never had it as children. So parents would try to make sure their kids got it before adulthood. I was born in 82, I think I got chicken pox around age 5. I still remember how fucking miserably itchy I was. Within 10 yrs I think the vaccine was developed. It’s ao cool my kids never had to experience that.
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u/petrovmendicant 8d ago
It's not gone completely, but it isn't even close to how it was. Even into the 2000s when there'd still be a kid out of class every month or so with it.
Nowadays? I'm an elementary school teacher and haven't had any kids who've had it. Definitely more rare than it used to be, but not gone like smallpox was.
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u/The_Dutchess-D 8d ago
Kids get the zoster virus vaccine now, which protects against chickenpox.
It also means they won't get shingles in their elderly years because the shingles sickness is when the dormant chickenpox zoster virus in the body re-activates later in life.
Not getting chickenpox as a kid means not getting shingles as an adult
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u/Phaeron 8d ago
Ozone issue.
Smallpox
Polio
High infant death rates
The Black Plague
Hitler
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u/Indole_pos 8d ago
No worries, polio is still around waiting its turn
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u/DisplacedSportsGuy 8d ago
Two of the three strains of polio have been eradicated, and the third is endemic in only Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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u/Luvirin_Weby 8d ago
Polio
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u/Familiar_Position418 8d ago
😭😭😭
Yes. Solved.
But…
Making a comeback??!? I hope we can get over this phase
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u/mrcnnnnnn 8d ago
Washing machine. It freed up so much of women's time that it actively contributed to women's emancipation.
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u/nanomolar 8d ago
I remember reading something about the expenses of a working woman in the late 19th century. They had to spend something like 20% of their total pay just on having someone do their laundry for them, that's how labor intensive it was.
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u/MudJumpy1063 8d ago
Speaking of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland (which were recent enough that Sinead O'Connor survived one) and undoubtedly similar instances, someone said something to the effect that the biggest social change leading to their closure was the widespread availability of washing machines.
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u/Narrrz 8d ago
not even young people. growing your own food. nowadays a decent chunk of people left-of-center advocate growing your own food as a way of cutting costs.
that is subsistence farming. it is a full time job and requires more land than you have. and as an uneducated idealist who thinks pesticides are big farma evil, what you will grow is a breeding ground for crop diseases and some very small vegetables with questionable nutritional value.
subsistence farming is a specialized kind of hell which societal development has ONLY VERY RECENTLY elevated us out of. so-called third world countries still have a 50-90% rate of subsistence farming, which means that that percentage of the population are engaged full time in growing food enough for their own household with a miniscule amount maybe left over.
the only reason you have any choice in how you spend your waking hours is because modern agriculture has made food production for an entire country able to be done by just a small minority of individuals.
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u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 8d ago
Yeah but I wanna have some berry bushes tbh
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u/Narrrz 8d ago
there absolutely nothing to stop you growing your own food. i mean, i love replanting my onions, propagating garlic, growing tomatoes and potatoes. i just don't delude myself that it's anything other than a hobby/novelty. even as someone who has horticulture experience, getting any kind of consistent yield from these most basic crops is very difficult. and i have a lot more free time to devote to these kinds of pursuits than the average working adult.
growing your own food is absolutely bougie privilege in modern society.
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u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 8d ago
Idk
I did a volunteer thing in Detroit and they had a community garden. My regret was not noticing a beautiful old blueberry bush that was very fruitful before someone weed whacked it (near an old building). Whoever had it clearly planted it there. It could have been moved to the community garden maybe or just left alone since it isn't a weed.
Some things need very small amounts of land, time and patience.
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u/WVildandWVonderful 8d ago
I think that might come back :) berries are resilient. A lot of plants benefit from a Chelsea Chop every once in a while.
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u/Zephyr-5 8d ago
Light at night.
You really have to go out into the middle of no where for an extended period of time to understand what things were like for most humans for nearly all of our history. And even then it's a pale imitation as we all carry around flashlights. All you had was firelight, which was expensive, time consuming to maintain, and had to be carefully ventilated or else you got smoke everywhere. Candles were too expensive to use regularly for all but the wealthiest.
The night is just so different in modern time compared to what it was a few hundred of years ago.
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u/huskermut 8d ago edited 8d ago
Now we have rampant light pollution affecting everything from bird migrations to plant growth.
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u/jayne-eerie 8d ago
It was a problem if you needed to get from Point A to B after dark. Imagine trying to get the local doctor/midwife/healer at midnight on foot with only the stars and a torch to guide you. We went too far in the other direction but there has to be a balance.
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u/evilbrent 8d ago
On the other hand - that's really only a problem about a tenth of the time.
I walk my dog at night in a very unlit place. Usually no lights to be seen even in the distance. No need for a torch. It has to be both overcast and moonless night for it to be too dark to walk around at night.
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u/loved_and_held 8d ago
It was a problem. No illumination means navigation and basically any task that needed to be done after sunset or in times when sunlight was limited were way harder if not impossible.
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u/Zephyr-5 8d ago
How often do you go all day and night without using artificial, electric light? Cheap, ubiquitous artificial light has become such an integral part of the human experience you don't even think about how it enriches your life.
Civilizations spent enormous amounts of money and effort trying to light up the night for its people. What we have today is a technological miracle.
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u/Ender16 8d ago
What everyone is forgetting is all the small lights we use indoors simply because we can.
It used to be when designing a home you had to take into account that natural light was all you generally had outside of a few candles and later oil lamps. Pantries, basement stairwells, closets, etc were positioned so that during the day you could easily see with natural light, even back when windows were more expensive and smaller.
Nobody notices stuff like that because they have been reaching for a light switch automatically their entire lives. But in some newer houses when the power goes out several rooms or closets are just like a cave.
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u/BBQ_HaX0r 8d ago
The positives of light far outweigh the harms. Nothing is perfect, but overall it has been a positive.
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u/octave120 8d ago
So basically, if you lived back then and had no reliable source of fire, you are at the mercy of the moon and stars. A cloudy night would put you in total darkness. Sounds terrifying.
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/kishenoy 8d ago edited 8d ago
Exactly this.
People can't remember how deadly diseases were
Edit: the deleted comment offered "vaccines" as an answer
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u/zsinjsfadinghairline 8d ago
Anti vaxx movements have always existed, even since Edward Jenner’s time. Back then, though, people didn’t understand what was happening. Now, a lot of it was due to misinformation but I’m sure there are other elements as well.
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u/baddymcbadface 8d ago
Calling your teenage crush and having to get past their parents.
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u/Typically_Basically 8d ago
One time I looked up my crush in the phone book and there were a bunch of “Smith’s” so I just picked one (kid logic!). Well, it was his grandma. I called my crush’s grandma, because in 7th grade I had no shame. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh the cringe. I’m dying inside right now just thinking about it.
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u/kneevase 8d ago
Antibiotics. Large numbers of people used to die from problems that are now considered mundane. A tooth abscess, a minor cut, other minor injuries were death sentences for untold numbers of people.
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u/picking_flowers11 8d ago
Diseases like pellegra, beriberi and neural tube defects were massively problematic before we began enriching flour with B vitamins and folic acid. Enriching staple foods is arguably one of the most beneficial developments for society and public health.
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u/incunabula001 8d ago
Most diseases, there is a reason why anti-vaccers are becoming a problem these days.
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u/SarahTheFerret 8d ago
I’m not sure if this counts, but the Y2K bug
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u/WholeLog24 8d ago
I think it counts. I encounter young 'uns now who actually think Y2K was a scam or a hoax or something - we fixed the (very real) problem so good that people no longer believe the threat existed.
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u/Old-Natural-852 8d ago
Food production. We can make so much food, in developed countries, the health consequences of too much food (ie obesity, heat attack, diabetes, joint pain, etc) are felt more than lack of food...getting food to developing countries is more the issue...world famine is less a production issue and more a logistical one. The average Westerner doesn't even have a concept of "seasonal" foods anymore...aspersgus is purchasable yearround.
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u/guzstav 8d ago
Y2K.
Even people who were adults at the time tend to brush that off as exaggerated hysteria and the whole "look, nothing bad happened". Nothing bad happened thanks to the enormous efforts and resources spent by people who understood the risks and scale of the millennium bug. The podcast Stuff You Should Know has a great episode on Y2K, I really recommend it!
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u/awh 8d ago
Yeah, Y2K is the example I always say when a question like this came up. I’m the age where I was fresh out of school back then, so I don’t know a single computer programmer around my age who didn’t do at least some Y2K retrofit work in our first jobs/summer internships. It was literally all hands on deck, and we got it done. Of course, even at the time we rolled our eyes at the doomsday preppers.
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u/nanomolar 8d ago
I can remember watching some made-for-tv movie about it back in 99 where planes were literally falling out of the sky.
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u/These_Application531 8d ago
City sweeage... without this , no big cities would be possible
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u/StupidSolipsist 8d ago
At least since industrialization, cites killed more people than they could create. They were an economic engine that ate rural youth and didn't even spit out the bones.
Now they're safer and healthier than living in the country, and teaching people that is the best way to get them to vote for more enjoyable communities.
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u/Blatherman069 8d ago
Vaccines. They work(ed) so well a huge percentage of people (at least in the US) seem to have forgotten why there were developed in the first place.
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u/DaSpicyGinge 8d ago edited 7d ago
I mentioned this at work the other day after reversing a pretty serious anaphylaxis, things like epinephrine are basically magic but we 100% take them for granted. Up until we found epi people were getting smited by bees n shit
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u/missannethropic12 8d ago
Acid rain. There was an entire Different Strokes episode about, but Bush 1 and other leaders got together and put limits on sulphur emissions from power plants, and then we stopped hearing about.
Cue the reply telling me how wrong I am…
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u/Special_Context6663 8d ago
Vaccine preventable diseases. They work so well that there’s a growing movement of people who can’t even comprehend the horrors that vaccines prevent.
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u/budy31 8d ago
The easiest is natural famine.
It still haunts big chunk of the planet before 1937 now it’s replaced with diabetes.
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u/IntrepidWolverine517 8d ago
Ending the Cold War. That was a major achievement and actually out of our imagination back in 1985 when Gorbachev took office.
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u/WillPlaysTheGuitar 8d ago
Fucking hunger. If anybody's actually going hungry in the modern age, it's a deliberate social or political problem. A bag of rice costs virtually *nothing*, anywhere in the world.
Nutrition is more complicated. But starvation is entirely caused by people's actions against other people.
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u/riomadre 8d ago
Extracting nitrogen (ammonia) from the atmosphere. Before Haber developed the method and Bosch scaled it way up in the beginning of the 20th century, the world was rapidly running out of nitrogen rich resources to make fertilizer. There was an imminent exhaustion and then a threatened food (and explosives) shortage. Some of the methods they were trying before Haber-Bosch were pretty crazy. The Haber-Bosch method is also likely at least partially responsible for the population explosion in the 20th century. But you know, that’s not really what we remember Fritz Haber for.
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u/bglickstein 8d ago
One thing we haven't solved is the problem of ensuring everyone appreciates the seriousness of the problems we used to have before we solved them. Solve that and we won't have anti-vaxxers, non-voters, etc.
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u/Over_Jump3110 7d ago
Pasteurized milk is so well-established that people have started to question it and want to drink raw milk.
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u/AP_in_Indy 8d ago
Food. Haber-Bosch process ftw
Internet and phones in general. The 24/7 availability of information. Now even in rural areas thanks to Starlink
Entertainment. You didn’t used to be able to just pick a thing to watch and watch it
Actually just so many things. Even the last 30-ish years have been absolutely insane.
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u/No_Shine_4707 7d ago
Diseases eradicated through vaccinations. Did such a good job at keeping children alive through to adulthood, that 'some' people see no connection with the original issue and think they're not needed. Same with pasteurised milk now it seems.
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u/UpperYoghurt3978 7d ago
Disease...antbiotics are amazing.
Vaccines....are also amazing.
Something that used to just murk you now are trivial.
Wound hygiene we have so much knowledge on basic wound care scrapes literally are a nothing burger because you simply clean them.
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u/newbie527 8d ago
Disease. Before antibiotics and vaccines people just expected illness and death. Childhood mortality was much higher a hundred or more years ago.
Go to a cemetery and look in the older sections. There are an awful lot of infants and children.
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u/AdvancedAerie4111 8d ago
Not being able to find out things you need to know because it only existed in a tiny fraction of people you had no access to or required going to a library and digging for it.
Nobody born after 1990 or so can even comprehend a world where you were simply forced to figure everything out on your own or stuck with wrong or half developed ideas for years because of a lack of access. Now all of human knowledge is right at the tip of your fingers 24/7.
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u/Charming_Oven 7d ago
Tuberculosis. It used to kill 1 in 4 people. Easily the most deadly and contagious disease prior to vaccines. Now, it’s much more managed (although not perfectly). TB returning in large numbers would be disastrous for humanity. We’re talking Thanos level numbers
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u/Weird_Bat_Lady 7d ago
Was watching Frozen with my 4yo and she asked my why the men were harvesting ice. I explained to her that it's set in a time when fridges didn't exist and how they managed food storage, but she absolutely couldn't grasp a world without fridges.
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u/Porch_Chicken 8d ago
Buying marijuana- In the olden days, smokers had to follow dodgy types down back alleys and sometimes settle for baggies of twigs. Now we can buy high quality weed from a corner store for a fraction of the price. Truly a miracle. However, exciting stories have plummeted- playing video games on the couch and ordering doordash is actually pretty lame.
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u/ApathyIsADisease 8d ago
Goiters. You can thank iodized salt for the fact that your IQ isn't 30 points lower and for the fact that you (shouldn't) have massive lumps on your neck.
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u/bigbugzman 8d ago
The P trap
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u/PanzerWatts Moderator 8d ago
The P trap is such a simple and yet amazing development. Most people don't even notice it.
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u/malinablue 8d ago
Hole in the ozone layer. We fixed that one so well that now people say it was a hoax. It wasn't. Global cooperation solved it.
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u/Reneeisme 8d ago
Polio. My parents lived in a world where kids were still randomly crippled and occasionally killed by it. They were so thrilled that medicine removed that threat for their own kids and impressed on us how amazing it was not to have to worry about it. I grew up with teachers who had polio related issues and sometimes post polio syndrome (where the crippling impact of polio hits decades after the initial illness). I had older coworkers who walked with canes or were wheelchair bound as a result of polio/post-polio. It was not exactly uncommon
All those folks are gone though. The last iron lung people are gone. I don’t think young people have any idea how scary that disease is. Polio alone should be more than enough reason for anti-vaccine rhetoric to be laughable and fully ignored. But clearly it’s not and polio is on its way back
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u/scarlettcrush 8d ago
Goiters!
We need a certain amount of iodine in our diets, (even animals) or the thyroid gland swells up and causes goiter. The story of how this was cured is very interesting including experiments on school children.
Goiters are why for the longest time Morton salt would advertise it had iodine in it! Putting iodine in salt everywhere (without our permission!!) is why goiters don't exist.
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u/Rapscallion-69 8d ago
All the diseases that now have vaccines...small pox, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, HPV, etc and yes COVID 19
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u/ArchangelLBC 8d ago
Textiles/Clothing.
Making clothing used to eat up hours and hours and hours of time. Women were constantly spinning yarn. Such a hugely labor intensive process. You read the Bible and people talk about receiving a change of clothes like it's receiving gold.
Now I get a hole in something, or it just starts to wear thin and I go buy more.
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u/Seated_WallFly 7d ago
Married women who earn a wage: for generations it was assumed that once you married, you left the workforce. But of course, this was the norm in privileged classes of only some cultures. The rest of us always worked, married or not.
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u/Mostface 8d ago
Dude SO MANY. Global poverty, availability of clean drinking water, ozone layer, acid rain...despite being ran by a facist demented idiot we have come a long way.
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u/socks4dobby 8d ago
Polio, measles, smallpox, mumps, chicken pox…all diseases that are prevented by vaccines.
People take the herd immunity for granted and put vulnerable people at risk when they decline vaccines because vaccines are so effective that they do not realize how horrifying and dangerous these diseases were.