It’s Not All Bad: 11 Major Pieces Of Good News The World Gave Us In 2016
Below is my favourite worldwide positive news of the year — not to downplay the significance of all the bad news we’ve seen in 2016, but as a note (to myself if no one else!) that there are still reasons to be optimistic about the world we care about. I do realise that there’s an inherent bias when writing this from the position of a privileged white man. Albeit one who lost his best friend this year. If you look carefully though, from science to healthcare to politics, there are stories that surely anyone can be positive about.
Here’s my top 11, no particular order:
1. West Africa’s ebola outbreak, which was big news a couple of years ago, has now officially ended. In another of many public health achievements, the World Health Organisation’s Americas region also eliminated measles in 2016, the result of a 22-year vaccination effort.
2. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal has survived, showing that international diplomacy can actually get stuff done. Some years ago it looked inevitable that Iran would get the bomb, and if we’d have asked ourselves how the next major war might happen, many of us would probably have gone for a scenario involving Iran.
3. Aging: There were several interesting announcements about anti-aging research this year. One example: this month, some scientists at the Salk Institude in California have revealed they’ve apparently ‘reversed signs of aging’ in mice (and human skin cells in the lab) using gene therapy. Many caveats of course, but there are indications that aging (and all its associated health problems from dementia to cancer) may be something we can actually do something about in future years.
4. Climate change: Some politicians often used to say that we had to choose between cutting carbon emissions and achieving economic growth, that you couldn’t have both. In the past, it was true that global emissions fell during recessions and grew all other times. But now 2016 is the third year in a row that the amount of CO2 humans put into the atmosphere has been essentially flat, despite global economic growth of about 2.5% each year. Energy efficiency and renewables are making a difference.
5. Gravitational waves: Their detection was announced in February by the ‘LIGO’ observatory. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein and were the last element of his theory of General Relativity that remained unproven. Apparently this development will allow us to observe bits of the universe we’ve never seen before, including its early history. It’s a whole new area of astronomy.
6. Artificial intelligence: In March, Google’s ‘AlphaGo’ programme beat the human world champion at the hugely strategic and complex game of ‘Go’ (I know, I’d never heard of it before this year either! It’s a big game in East Asia). A landmark that many thought was still many years away. This is less about the development of ‘evil AI’ and more about advancing the machine learning and deductive systems that are creating better speech and image recognition technologies, among other things.
7. Alcohol consumption: It’s actually going down. I know many of us enjoy a drink, but ultimately a general reduction in a population is linked to less cancer, liver disease, drink-related road deaths etc. This article mostly talks about possible reasons why it’s happened in the UK, but last year was also apparently the first time that worldwide consumption dropped and that trend is believed to have continued through 2016.
8. Our genetic heritage: It now looks likely that all non-Africans are descended from a tiny group of people who left Africa just 50,000 years ago. From Ecuador to Israel to Indonesia, the overlap of anthropology and new gene technologies is showing that we’re even closer than we thought.
9. Proxima B: We’ve heard for many years about NASA finding planets beyond our own solar system. This year a rocky planet was found in the ‘habitable zone’ of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own Sun, which we might actually get to explore with small robots in the future. It’s very unlikely to have any life but to find something like this so close to us indicates that Earth-like planets could be extremely common in the galaxy. Meanwhile the Hubble telescope has made the first analysis of exoplanets’ atmospheres, showing positive signs for habitability (not life — yet!) already.
10. Worldwide average life expectancy has increased by 5 years since 2000, reversing declines seen in the 1990s when AIDs and economic problems caused worsening health in Africa and Eastern Europe.
11. One more for good measure: Whatever we think about our political problems in 2016, most people in the world still live in democracies. This article uses data up to 2015, but as a proportion of the world’s population and in absolute numbers, we’re still pretty much at an all-time high. Of course some democracies are better than others, and within non-democracies there’s a range of repressiveness and economic outcomes. But I’ll venture that if you had to be reborn randomly in any period of history — not knowing your race or class, only being able to choose whether to be born in a ‘democracy’ or not — you’d gamble on democracy, all else being equal. This year I visited North Korea, bottom of the ‘democracy index’ table, and this point was made a lot clearer to me from what I saw there.
Here’s a picture I took walking the Great Wall of China with friends this autumn. 2,600 years after they started building, it’s still beautiful — just needs a bit of looking after!
Happy new year — and do remember to look for the good news in 2017.
