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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

In 1966, it was nuclear winter; today it's climate change. It's interesting how children's views of what can go wrong in the future change based on what seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time. I wonder what children from 1900 would say to the same question…war, maybe?

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I could be wrong, but my understanding is that people were generally pretty optimistic in the early 1900s (before WW1 obviously). Everyday applications for electricity were rapidly changing daily life for people.

You had then (as now) several major trends. The progressivists were modernists promoting modernism -- technology and rationality (along with a whole host of jingoistic thinking).

A principle response was the fundamentalist movement, back to fundamentals, especially of religion, and against science and technology, most especially evolution. See the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist–Modernist_contr...

There is a good chance the optimism was related to economic opportunity from the die-off of humans from the war. Similar trends in societal change (not the contents themselves, but the trends of the changes) can be seen in post-plague Europe.

Suddenly human capital was more valuable.

In 1900, the existential threats were the same they'd long been throughout (and before) human history: famine, pestilence, disease, war. The Four Horsemen.

There were risks of which people would not have been aware, or would have been only loosely aware: asteroid impacts, gamma ray bursts, supervolcanoes.

The main difference today is that our major existential threats are now endogenous rather than exogenous. We've made them ourselves.

This more so than even epidemic disease, a consequence of dense urbanisation, poor hygiene, lack of a theory of disease, and widespread and distant commerce. Ancient civilisations, from Rome onward (and before) co-evolved with their major epidemics. I cannot recommend Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome highly enough in this regard.

> In 1966, it was nuclear winter;

Actually, in 1966 it was just the perspective of being killed by blasts or poisoned by radioactive fallout.

The popularization of the idea of nuclear winter came later, late 70s / early 80s I believe.

Ahh, 1983, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Quite, I was going to make the same comment.

Google Ngram for "nuclear winter" shows awareness exploding in the 1980s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nuclear+winter...

The landmark paper was Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and Sagan ("TTAPS"), "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions" (1983):

https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.222.4630.1283

While there was some prior work, dating to the 1950s, there was effectively no public awareness.

Disease maybe? The Spanish flu wiped out more people than WW1.

Dying of the flu isn't visceral enough to grab the imagination. It would be scarier if we were living in medieval Europe and we personally know friend and families that were killed off by the Plague, but in modern society it's too removed of a threat to really strike fear in children's hearts.

Of my grandfather's family, of his nine siblings, two survived. All of them where strong and healthy, late-twenties to early thirties, and died within three days. We elide over the impact of that event to rather focus on the notion that such concept are safely 'in the past'.

“…every, nearly every porch, every porch that I’d look at had–would have a casket box a sittin’ on it. And men a diggin’ graves just as hard as they could and the mines had to shut down there wasn’t a nary a man, there wasn’t a, there wasn’t a mine arunnin’ a lump of coal or runnin’ no work. Stayed that away for about six weeks.”[1]

On another note, the Spanish flu is responsible for Americans' shift from 'parlor' to 'living room'[2]

[1] https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2017/10/great-pandemic-of...

[2]https://blogsurabhi.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/what-is-the-ori...

Your grandfather's family isn't the modern world that children today know. Incidents from a century ago are hard to relate to someone who knows only modern medicine and sanitation.

Did the people from a century ago feel like they were in a low-tech time where medical solutions hadn't been invented yet? I suspect they felt like they were at the very front of modern life and were reaping the benefits of modern knowledge and technology. Then, suddenly something new and unexpected came along and revealed how fragile they really were.

Today we might also feel that we're at the very front of modern life and reaping the benefits of modern knowledge and tech. However, even our great county of Los Angeles has been taken over by a new mosquito that is hurting our quality of life:

https://www.glacvcd.org/vector-information/mosquitoes/invasi...

https://abc7.com/health/ankle-biter-mosquitoes-more-common-i...

As far as I'm aware, we have no practical solution for this new problem.

Ah, but now you prove my point.

In the comment section about an article on how children perceive the world?

I’d say disease is a lot more visceral than something like climate change. The former can affect you, personally, on a time scale you can perceive while the latter doesn’t, for the most part.

> It's interesting how children's views of what can go wrong in the future change based on what seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time.

"People are most afraid of the greatest perceived danger" seems entirely expected. It would be interesting if it weren't so.

> seems to be the most relevant disaster of the time

Of course they were. Would the alternative be to worry about something else that is less of a threat or they don't know about?

Some imagined 'futuristic' threat perhaps, more along the lines of the first boy's answer (which doesn't really carry any judgement, but could) about the robot court and computer funeral.

He didn't really explain why or much about it, but another was concerned about large ugly areas of the country sectioned off for recreation.

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