UN experts predicted that the ozone layer could fully recover in 40 years. The problem that seemed unsolvable 20 years ago now seems to be losing its relevance. In this regard, HB made the top scientific and unscientific predictions about the fate of mankind, which did not come true.
“Everybody lies” - that's what the hero Hugh Laurie, the cynical drug addict from the cult American television series, said. Of course, in the era of post-truth and “flat earth news,” Dr. House's favorite phrase should become every person's life slogan. But, as practice shows, few are accustomed to doubting the information that has been considered reliable for many years.
For example, the other day, experts from the United Nations (UN) announced that the ozone layer of the Earth in the Northern Hemisphere should fully recover by 2030, and on the entire planet - by 2060. According to experts from the UN, the decisive role in this was played by the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which introduced a ban on the production of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer.
Although in a recent investigation by The New York Times, journalists found out that many factories in China still use substances prohibited by the Montreal Protocol, ignore environmental regulations and endanger all life on the planet.
And the point is not even that the debate has now resumed between scientists who prove that their work has brought real results, and skeptics who are confident that the protective ball in the atmosphere would recover on its own. The bottom line is that the "ozone horror story", which seemed an irreversible and insoluble problem in the 1990s, may now lose its relevance.
In this regard, we recall the loudest forecasts of our time, which never came true.
Killer collider
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Strikingly, for many of the inhabitants of the Earth, the main threat to the existence of our planet over the past 10 years has not been nuclear wars, global famine, or even an alien attack. The general public was afraid of launching the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was supposed to accelerate charged particles for scientific research.
Moreover, even "experts" sowed panic: in 2008, former employees of the US Nuclear Security Commission Walter Wagner and Lewis Sancho said that the LHC could destroy humanity.
The couple were not happy that research could lead to the creation of a black hole on Earth and the emergence of the so-called "strange matter" that can change the gravitational field of our planet.
Later, scientists from Switzerland refuted the assumptions of Wagner and Sancho, proving that black holes can appear only at the subatomic level and immediately disappear, and the presence of "strange matter" is completely anti-scientific theory.
Instead of the predicted apocalypse, over 10 years of the collider's operation, researchers managed to discover the Higgs Boson, confirm the existence of many tiny particles and make a number of more important discoveries in modern science.
Bird flu
Today, the name of this virus is no longer perceived with such caution as it was in the late 2000s.
Then the disease seemed really frightening, since the authoritative World Health Organization (WHO) rang all the bells. After the outbreak of the epidemic in the period from 2003 to 2006, the country promised to allocate about $ 2 billion to fight the disease.
UN Coordinator David Novarro said the event was serious enough. “Today we see that the world is really worried and wants to overcome the threat of bird flu and a possible global epidemic,” Novarro told The New York Times.
His colleagues from the WHO estimated that in 2006 alone, about 150 million people would be infected with the H5N1 virus.
The forecast came out a little exaggerated: according to the same WHO, from 2003 to 2014, 701 cases of avian influenza were recorded, and 407 of them were fatal.
150 year old people
Biochemist Dr. Bernard Louis Strehler, who studied the aging process in humans, was convinced that the cells of the human body are the main problem in life expectancy.
Since over time they lose the ability to separate, Strehler proposed replacing the old cells with new ones, and then, in his words, we could live "for a very long time, if not forever."
The scientist died in 2001 at the age of 76 from a heart attack, but at the peak of his research in the mid-1970s he managed to reassure the whole world with a rather loud statement: speaking at a conference of the Federation of Experimental Biology, a researcher from California predicted that people will live by 150 years by the end of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, Dr. Strehler's dream has not yet come true and, moreover, has no particular prospects in the near future. Although, as NV previously wrote, the Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov plans to completely transfer a person's personality to a robotic computer and provide the world with “digital immortality” already in 2045.
Wanga's predictions
Not only scientists, but also the Balkan seer Vangelia Pandeva Gushterova aka Vangelia Surcheva aka Vangelia Dimitrova aka Baba Vanga had a significant influence on popular opinion.
According to some reports, the psychic predicted such disasters as the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the terrorist attacks in the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.
But the most famous prediction of Wanga is much more serious: “modern Nostradamus” is credited with the forecast of the Third World War 2010-2014.
At this time, the Earth was to be stirred up by numerous nuclear explosions, the massive use of chemical weapons, wars between representatives of different religions and the complete extermination of the population of Europe.
We will remind, Vanga died in 1996 at the age of 85 from cancer.
Mayan end of the world
And, of course, one cannot do without the most important prediction of the 21st century.
The interpretations of the calendar of the ancient South American Mayan tribe, which became popular in the media, said that the transition to the next sixth era of the Earth was to take place on December 21, 2012.
This information became a klondike for the yellow press and pseudoscientists who were promoting themselves on statements about a global cataclysm and a real Armageddon.
For knowledgeable researchers, such predictions did not carry the slightest value, since the end of the world in 2012 had no practical evidence and only distracted society from the real climate problems on the planet.