Predicting the Future is Hard, Even for the Experts
Wrong, a Freethink original series presented by GOOD Magazine, exposes three widely-believed predictions about the future that fooled experts and even incited mass panics.
Celebrate April Fool’s Day with these failed predictions.
1. We’re All Going to Starve
Beginning in the 1960s experts believed that the world was becoming dangerously overpopulated and soon we’d be unable to feed ourselves. A slew of books from leading experts popularized this theory. Overpopulation fears led to China’s one child policy and forced sterilizations in India. However, these predictions failed to come true thanks in large part to American scientist Norman Borlaug. Borlaug’s new strains of high yield disease resistant wheat allowed global food production to surpass demand.
Borlaug is credited with saving billions from starvation and defusing the population bomb.
2. Beware of the Frankenbabies
When in vitro fertilization was first developed by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, the public panicked. Scientists warned, “Beware of test tube babies.”
Experts feared that IVF would lead to the creation of so called Frankenbabies and open the door to human cloning. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA claimed, “All hell would break loose politically and morally all over the world.”
On July 25th 1978, Edwards and Steptoe delivered Louise Joy Brown, a totally normal baby girl. Louise’s birth paved the way for 5 million IVF babies and counting.
3. The Y2K Bug is Going to Bite
In the 90s, experts sounded the alarm about the Y2K bug, a simple computer flaw that would crash systems globally on January 1, 2000. Computer scientists, the media, and politicians hyped the dangers of Y2K leading individuals, corporations and governments to spend billions preparing for the worst.
When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, the world didn’t end. The government’s final report on Y2K found that only .001% of imbedded microchips were actually at risk of failing. Did we narrowly avoid the apocalypse because of some last minute de-bugging? Or was the worldwide panic just way off base?
