history

23064 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to c/history! History is written by the posters.

c/history is a comm for discussion about history so feel free to talk and post about articles, books, videos, events or historical figures you find interesting

Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember...we're all comrades here.

Do not post reactionary or imperialist takes (criticism is fine, but don't pull nonsense from whatever chud author is out there).

When sharing historical facts, remember to provide credible souces or citations.

Historical Disinformation will be removed

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Crises avoided which are little known/celebrated? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The metaphorical “what if we killed Hitler before he became Hitler”

In studying history, we are restricted by practicality to study only such things that concretely happened. Surely this leads to something like survivorship bias, so we could be placing undue scientific emphasis on things which were unlikely given material conditions, yet occurred nonetheless.

Therefore some level of speculation is necessary I think, in order to learn from the things which went right due to the non-occurrence of events. Like the eternal dilemma of system admins, the proof of their usefulness is nothing happening, things not breaking, which in turn appears as proof that they were unnecessary in the first place.

Best I can come up with is the handful of averted nuclear deployments during the Cold War, but those are fairly well known.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wish they would do the same for mosquitos

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah. Mosquitoe control is iffy bc it mostly involves draining swamps and spraying vast amounts of insecticide. Both are good for humans no dying of malaria and dengue and stuff, but very bad for the environment on every level.

There have been some goofy attempts at things like breeding huge numbers of sterile male mosquitoes to try to cause population collapse when the mosquitoes breed and don't produce viable offspring. On a smaller level you can sometimes buy pucks of some kind of nematode or bacteria that devour mosquitoe eggs and larva if you've got a pond or something. There have been some fairly silly attempts to make little lasers that spot mosquitoes and burn their wings off.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

some kind of nematode or bacteria that devour mosquitoe eggs and larva

the wee crustaceans in new york public water are meant to do that as well

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There was that Gates Foundation program in South America that attempted those genetic modifications and all of a sudden you had Zika exploding around the same regions. Coincidence? Maaaybe.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

bats are good though