Excellent article in today’s Parade magazine by Michael Crichton about the decades of false doomsday predictions he’s seen. It won’t be online until the 13th of December, 2004, but you can read it today by picking up a Sunday Seattle Times\/Post-Intelligencer.<\/p>\n
In fact, the trend of false doomsday predictions goes back further than even Mr. Chichton points out, but the author is working only from his personal recollections. In fact, way back in the 18th century (1798), Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principal of Population<\/em>, in which he observed “that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too is capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, man’s misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume Man” (berkley.edu<\/a>).<\/p>\n As Crichton points out, doomsday predictions have been around for all time. Until we learn to generally ignore them (as Crichton recommends), we will continue to live in fear, and hurt ourselves with legislation reacting to problems that don’t really exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Excellent article in today’s Parade magazine by Michael Crichton about the decades of false doomsday predictions he’s seen. It won’t be online until the 13th of December, 2004, but you can read it today by picking up a Sunday Seattle Times\/Post-Intelligencer. In fact, the trend of false doomsday predictions goes back further than even Mr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,13],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything","tag-politics","tag-recommended"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcanius.silverfir.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}