Modern society. At the end 60s hippies were right after all...
The USA
Humans.
Opting for gasoline over electricity early on when cars started to become a thing, we were already going electric, but a smear campaign put fear into people's minds about electric and switched tk gasoline.
We always have to pander to the capitalists profits, how could the make money with clean electricity???
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn't show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it's a tricky science even today, so I'm skeptical.
It's possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don't see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
That's because of car companies pushing the mentality that everyone needs to drive everywhere... for freedom and shit.
We could have been more like europe is today and have a robust railsystem. Shit, we could have had the best rail system in the world.
Or, y'know, there's a war on and you can't stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle...
Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don't worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.
So... there isnt a war in the US right now, and there probablywont be one.
"Lead-acid electric..." when was the last time you looked at an electric car. Electric cars can now give you 400+ miles of range just like ICE vehicles, and I don't have to scavenge fuel from who knows where, all I need is a few solar panels and I'm good... eventually.
Also, IF this was a war zone, I'd rather be whisper quiet than to tell everyone around that I'm driving by with the sound of an engine. Oh and it's easier to remain undetected by food than on a vehicle anyway.
Yeah, I know, I'm not arguing against electric now, or even as a concept then. This was an alt-history exercise, remember?
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.
It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
Humans.
Let's go with the atomic bomb...if you disagree, consider that we made a weapon too powerful to ever be used again, but nations that have them get taken way more seriously in diplomacy.
And let's be serious, it's pretty much tick-tock, tick-tock before they get used again when they get put in the hands of zealots. Let's be doubly serious, it will be religion that convinces some leader that they are within their divine rights to cleanse the world of their enemies.
Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it's a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you're measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you're comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn't really have an end goal, as much as we'd like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he's famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing an accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he's like the real life Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Pheidippides of Battle of Marathon fame is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. ~~People regularly make the same trip and are fine.~~ He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn't want to be him. Edit: Maybe not a great example, actually. The story names a much longer distance than a marathon, although it's kinda mythical.
Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn't bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to steal their shit and kick them out instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his "virility". In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB's presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
If it's the same person I'm thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn't care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.
"Thanks bro/comrade!" would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.
Isn't what we call a marathon just the last short leg of his journey, and he ran like 100-150 miles?
In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.
The United States of America
Agriculture.
Ohh it's much worse than that. Usually humans would live to around 60 if they survived infancy before that. Their diet was varied and since food was a limited resource, there was no way of population blasts. But agriculture just fucked it all up. We stopped moving around since the land needed constant maintainence and since the diet became mostly carbohydrates, combined with back breaking work, our life expectancy dropped to 40. We didn't domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It took modern medicine... ie 20th century to get the average life expectancy up again.
I recommend you read the book called Sapiens. It's an eye opener.
Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?
Agriculture
Me
Stuart Pearce of England’s missed penalty kick in the 1990 World Cup semi finals.
Our collective response to climate change
That's right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It's resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can't afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can't afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
Cheers from across the hellscape, friend.
Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it's just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don't notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.
We need to close the loop again!
Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
letting unqualified businessmen rule the planet instead of experts in their given fields.
For me, this post is right under the person who said "Agriculture" and the response "Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?"
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their "given fields" isn't a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don't know if irony has survived.
Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.
Every time someone tried to make "a weapon so powerful it would make people not want to wage war".
Several weapons are on this list, from the cannon to the machine gun to, most famously, the atomic bomb.
The fact that this happened once would've been understandable. The fact this escalated to nuclear weapons because people just tried pushing this idea is nuts though.
This is not toward so much the technology, with all tech being no less inevitable, but more to do with the intentions/hindsight/foresight of the people making something that can only be produced by an assembly in a seemingly dire setting, as opposed to something like AI, which does not stem from that and which would've come around at some time.
By extension, this extends to populism in general, a mindset that from experience I refuse to compliment. I'm surrounded by people every day who come off as thinking with their feet and not with the methodological part of them, and my experiences with this have never allowed me to be fully at peace.
Leaded fuel
I remember one of my engineering profs describing Midgley as the most environmentally destructive organism ever, Dude also was involved in the creation of freon.
But he also killed the biggest environmentally destructive person on the planet.
Investing everything in engines and abandoning battery development in the early 1900s. Lead-acid batteries were heavy but usable, and electric cars were more popular until electric starters were added to engines. A disproportionately big, short-lived reason was the lack of sufficient electrical grid for electric cars trying to go far.
Nobody in government was thinking ahead, so everyone was forced to trying to make their own money NOW, and that's how we get inhumane tech in general. Same thing happening in computers for decades now. We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
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