

Bullets that we’ve dodged as a species - spottiness
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2011/06/07/bullets-that-weve-dodged-as-a-species/

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yread
All in all an interesting article, some of those catastrophes were perhaps
prevented by concentrated effort (banning of DDT, campaigns against spreading
HIV). But WTF is this:

 _The last few years have seemed to offer a lot of lessons about human hubris.
Here are some of the things that we’ve learned we can’t do safely: (a) drill
for oil in mile-deep water (Deepwater Horizon), (b) build nuclear power plants
on tsunami-prone coastlines (Fukushima), (c) build the world’s biggest
airliner and engines (Qantas Flight 32), (d) protect cities that are below sea
level from flooding (Katrina in New Orleans)._

a) _The world's deepest oil platform is the floating Perdido which is a spar
platform in the Gulf of Mexico in a water depth of 2,438 metres (7,999 ft)._
And it works just fine!

b) Japan's coast is full of nuclear power plants which should work well unless
a 1 in 1000 years earthquake strikes

c) what? Didn't the flight land just ok showing how robust the platform is?
During an uncontained engine failure the turbine disk isn't supposed to hit
the plane. This one did and it was ok.

d) The Netherlands? Hello?

~~~
evilduck
d) Hell, even more recently with the Mississippi river floods, New Orleans
totally escaped that thanks entirely to our ability to protect low lying areas
with human engineering. I'm sitting in my living room at a 3 feet above sea
level and about 19 feet below the Mississippi river level as I type this right
now.

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Sniffnoy
I admit I'm working with hindsight, but the cancer prediction just seems like,
well, a bad prediction; can we really call it a "bullet we've dodged"? Does
anyone know how credible this prediction was considered at the time?

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tokenadult
Betting against predictions of exhaustion of this or that natural resource
seems to be one of the smartest ways to bet.

<http://www.perc.org/articles/article588.php>

[http://globalgeography.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources...](http://globalgeography.aag.org/PopulationandNaturalResources1e/CF_PopNatRes_Jan10/CF_PopNatRes_Jan1011.html)

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html>

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monkeypizza
A lot of these have happened in alternate universes.

and evolutionarily, we dodged lots of bullets.

Imagine if we used the alligator's method of sex determination - based on
temperature of the egg at fertilization. Even in ancient times kings would
have been able to grow armies.

Imagine if our skull wasn't as thick and primitive humans had
institutionalized personality altering brain surgery, and our world were
descended from them.

