Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | Wired Science | Wired.com

Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times | Wired Science | Wired.com

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

Similar to stories in earlier newspapers compared to modern blogs. The race is on to get viewers and donations, often deceptively from Iv to B or vice versa. The predictions are usually chaotic, claims that tipping points and collapses are approaching. These stories mutate and collapse if they don't get people's interest or they might grow virally like a chaotic contagion. When the I-O police don't look for fraud and deception then this Iv-B media can detach from the more standard and normalized V-Bi stories.