5 Irrational Fears (Even Rational People Have)
Crowds are stupid. People panic over every "end of the world" theory they read about on the Internet, forward each other emails claiming Barack Obama is building concentration camps and they repeat urban legends without taking five seconds to verify them on Snopes.
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But everybody can get taken in sometimes. Just look at these panics that seemed to draw in lots of well-educated types right along with the rubes. Like...
#5.
Swine Flu
Cough. Within 30 seconds, someone in your office will ask if you have Swine Flu. If you say you do, you will be quarantined by a crowd bearing pitchforks and torches.
That scene is repeating itself all over the globe, to varying degrees. In Japan, they're selling a suit that makers claim can repel the H1N1 virus. In the Middle East, Iranian officials have banned their devout from going on Pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites, including Mecca, to avoid contamination. Saudi Arabia is requiring that pilgrims coming to Mecca provide proof of vaccination. For the very few of our readers who aren't devout Muslims, that's like canceling Christmas and making Aunt Ethel stand out in the snow until she shows you her small pox scar.
Why It Sounds Rational:
It's Swine Flu! Didn't the news say that this shit had the potential to kill like 100-million people?
And the news is never misleading.
And look at the response! The U.S. is preparing to vaccinate half the freaking population in under a year. That's never even been attempted before. Not even with Polio.
If you don't speak the language of local and cable news, allow us to translate: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY, PEOPLE! Get in your Swine Flu bunkers before it's too late!
Why It's Not:
The current pandemic of Swine Flu has claimed less than 3,000 lives. Well... that's still pretty bad, right? After all, that's like a flu-caused 9/11. Then again, the ordinary flu, that gives us the sniffles every year? That one kills several hundred thousand people around the world.
The reason for the early panic is that they believed this virus was a descendant of the 1918 Spanish Flu that wiped out a jaw-dropping 50-million people. And while it was obviously not as deadly, the fear was that it would eventually mutate into something like its apocalyptic ancestor.
Also, it's got a scary name.
Swine Flu mascot briefly considered by the CDC.
It hasn't lived up to it. Even the World Health Organization is describing this as a "moderate" outbreak. Their advice? Same as with the regular flu. Babies and old people should get vaccinated. The rest of your should wash your hands and stay away from sick people.
The World Health Organization would also like to remind everyone that it's safe to go back to eating your pork rinds, as there is no proof that pork causes Swine Flu and you cannot believe everything you read on fucking Twitter.
#4.
Killer Asteroids
Giant killer asteroids aren't just something Michael Bay dreamed up so he'd have an excuse to flatten Paris on the big screen. Stephen Hawking just made headlines around the Web by proclaiming that the biggest reason intelligent life doesn't develop on planets is because they get wiped out by huge fucking space rocks before they have the chance.
Asteroids could have stopped this.
Experts have conferences on how to orchestrate a "planetary defense" against such threats and magazines like Popular Science do articles every year on the asteroid menace.
Holy shit!
Why It Sounds Rational:
It's true that asteroids and comets are everywhere. Scientists guesstimate that somewhere between 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10-grams hit Earth every year. Our planet's crust is pock marked with proof that meteorites have slammed into Earth time and time again.
Why It's Not:
We're not disagreeing with Mr. Hawking here. It's that people tend to take what experts like him say and extrapolate it into, "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AT ANY MOMENT" because that makes such a better headline. For instance, the story linked above got sent around the Internet with the headline, "Stephen Hawking: Asteroid Impacts are the Biggest Threat." As if he was saying we should be more worried about asteroids than global warming or curing cancer.
He wasn't. He was saying that it takes millions of years for life to evolve and if you wait millions of years, eventually a big-ass asteroid will hit.
To be ranked as a planet killer, an asteroid has to be pegged as a 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. Currently, scientists can only find one asteroid near Earth that ranks even a one on that scale, never mind a 10. Everything else is a zero.
So how dangerous is that level one asteroid? It has about a one in 3,000 chance of hitting the Earth 40 or 50 years from now, and it's one-hundredth the size of the one they think killed the dinosaurs.
Again, we're not saying it can't possibly happen. It's that the odds are overwhelming that you will die of something else long before it does.
#3.
Cloning
Let's face it: There is not a single movie in the history of science fiction where cloning has turned out well. It's no surprise that when scientists in the 90s managed to clone a sheep named Dolly, the news media lost their shit.
Even the most enlightened, forward-thinking guy you know will hesitate to eat a steak that he's been told was cloned, and that guy will react even worse if his parents tell him they're going to clone him a little brother.
In fact, in 2008, the European Union called for a ban of all cloning for commercial purposes, meaning that no cloned critter bits could be brought into the European market and would prohibit everything from T-bone steaks to leather fetish gear being made from clones.
Why It Sounds Rational:
There just seems like so, so many ways this could go wrong. Science takes a few cells, bakes them in their magic E-Z Bake Ovens and produces an animal that was not conceived in any natural way. Then along come the venture capitalists, pie-eyed with dreams of cloning pets at exorbitant prices and filling private zoos with extinct species. The next thing we know we're all living in Jurassic Park without a dinosaur expert in sight.
Why It's Not:
First, what scientists are trying desperately to do is clone cells, as there are all sorts of medical breakthroughs that can happen if we learn how to grow certain kinds of cells at will. But cloning whole creatures is also in the cards, and fears about that seem to break down like this:
"Imagine a future of identical, soulless clones! All respect for human life would be ruined!"
It would be a shame if people started trivializing human life.
They're not talking about building a machine that spits out fully-grown human photocopies. They're talking about cloning embryos and letting them grow up normally. You can still think they're unnatural and weird, in the sense that you are also free to think identical twins are unnatural and weird. But if you treat them as less than human, you're the dick in that situation.
"The cloning process will produce horrific deformed cloned babies!"
The manufacture of grotesque flipper-babies for our amusement is probably already illegal where you live and if it's not, it soon will be. No one is in favor of that.
"It's playing God! And who can predict the effect such tinkering would have on the ecosystem?"
Actually, we've been "cloning" living things for thousands of years. We're talking about plants here, and farming depends on it. The result has been better plants that produce more food for everyone, without a single sentient man-eating plant to be found (though we probably tried).
It should also be noted that this is one of those technologies people assume is way further along than it actually is. Possibly because some publicity-seeking mad scientist comes along every few years and makes an outrageous claim about cloning humans or something else equally sure to get him headlines. Said scientist always proceeds to offer zero evidence, and then quietly slips back into obscurity, never to be heard from again.
Real scientists have managed to clone about a dozen species... almost all of which immediately die. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? Professor Wilmut, the scientist behind that project, has abandoned cloning as a technique. A team in South Korea that had claimed massive breakthroughs in the field turned out to be frauds.
What we're saying is we're much closer to a robot dinosaur rampage than a cloned dinosaur rampage, and urge scientists to put their efforts there instead.
Out of this list I'm only afraid of GMO... shit's not tested
ReplyI'd say I'm a bit worried about developed countries weaponizing compounds. I'm sure the US could do it under the table, so I'm sure russia or china or heck the UK could
Reply#4: The score is actually less than 1. Oh and this asteroid has since been shown to have a 0.0003-ish chance of hitting the earth.
ReplyThe cloning of humans is still a bad idea, not because they'd be mindless drones or freaks who want to kill us all, but because it would still take years or decades to work all the bugs out. So the first few generations of cloned humans would likely suffer all manner of medical problems and have a sucky life span. After all, Dolly had to be put down at age four after suffering multiple organ failures.
ReplySo how about if all that research ends up saving more lives than it's cost?
So why bother? best to just clone replacement parts without having ever been attached to a human. Of course, sooner or later, it WILL happen.
well im glad to say im an extremly rational (and somewhat insane) person and im not scared of anything on the list, unless the nutjobs left with the Real IRA read a Cracked article that tells them where to find nuclear material like the s**t left to rot in all the cold war era USSR subs...
Replyopps...
Seriously? People are STILL concerned about GM crops? Oh, how slowly the wheel of progress turns.
ReplyThat picture of France...
ReplyKudos for not ruining it with a captain. Probably the best moment on Cracked. Not the funniest, but definitely the best quip.
I think I must be weird, my irrational fears are of closed in spaces, heights, and clowns.
Reply"Well actually tolerate a few man-eating vines if it means a billion lives are saved."
ReplyMy favourite line out of the whole article!
I would love to eat the flying spaghetti monster
ReplyActually, the thing about swine flu was that it preferentially killed healthy adults; regular flu preferentially kills babies, elderly, and immune-compromised people. The killer with swine flu was an immune overreaction, so the usual groups were relatively safe and it was healthy adults in danger. That was what I was told that led me to get vaccinated for it, anyway. I don't know what the CDC said so probably believe them over me, but something to consider.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesA lot of what you could hear about h1n1 is crap, plain and simple. Personally, I don't take what the gov't says with a grain of salt...I take it with the whole shaker. Much of what they tell people is made up, especially what they say about things like H1N1 (forcing you to get sometimes expensive vaccines) or global warming(forcing you to buy expensive cars and expensive bulbs).
Are we noticing a theme here?
In case you didn't, the only things they tell you make you buy more to get them more money.
@Reki3 Because of course, as we all know, 75% of energy efficient bulb profits are given directly to Obama in cash.
LOL Reki3, umm they don't force anyone to get fuel efficient cars or vaccines... Lay off the reefer dude.
Yeah, about the GM foods. That is a recent phenomenon since the end of the Victorian ages. Look it up sometime.
ReplyHow about you look up the origin of corn? There's a reason you will never find a field of that s**t growing wild. It's been altered to such an extreme degree, that it can't even reproduce on its own.
It's very hard to find the risks of bioengineered crops because the seed companies work so hard to keep them from being tested. See "Wanted: GM Seeds for Study". And there are countless different modifications that can be made to crops, some can turn out harmful to humans, some don't. We don't know what most of the genes do when they are transferred, we just know that an overall effect is, for example, drought resistance, so we decide to start propagating that.
ReplyAlso, there is a very large risk difference between eating plants bred with other plants, both of which are fit for human consumption, compared taking genes from a bacteria (e.g. Bt) and putting the genes in a plant to have it create pesticides.
Yeah, kay, so you seem to have no conception of how f*****g difficult it is to make a GM crop.
1. You have to sequence the entire f*****g genome of the plant. You do of course realize that sequencing genes requires f*****g SUPERCOMPUTERS to do?
2. You have to figure out how EACH GENE WORKS WITH EVERY OTHER GENE. Because if you yank out the "I'm still alive" gene, the plant dies. If you shift the "Make Chlorophyll" gene sideways by two genes, you might get albino corn. If you splice in an extra gene right after the "Other Critical Mitochondrial Processes" gene, you might screw up an ENTIRE series of super important genes that render the entire corn plant dead.
3. You have to find a freaking gene that will actually work IN the plant and won't, for example, poison it. This means you have to sequence MORE GENOMES. WHICH TAKES SUPERCOMPUTERS.
4. You THEN have to put the gene into a vector, which transmits the new gene into the plant cell when it's still a plant embryo thing. You must do so in a way that is testable such that you can tell if your interns fucked up halfway through.
5. You must THEN place said gene into said Plant.
6. You must do this for several hundred plant embryo things or, if you fucked up when applying the genes, you'll be like "SHIT I HAVE TO DO ANOTHER", when instead you have several hundred possible viable GM plant embryo things.
7. THEN, you probably DID f**k up somewhere so either the entire batch is gone or you have to go through and test each one to see if its viable.
After that, it's a matter of finding the viable plants, propagating them under controlled conditions, planting them to make sure they don't die outside of the lab, then hoping to God nobody else did it already.
As you can see, if you don't know EXACTLY what you're doing at EVERY STEP, especially the beginning, you're company is going to be completely f*****g bankrupt.
Currently, we have the giants Monsanto and Pioneer Hybrid that make GM crops, amongst a bunch of smaller ones. These companies make a shit-ton of money every year.
I think it's a pretty excellent logical leap to say that if what you said was true, all of these companies would be dead by now.
I think it's an even BETTER logical leap to say that GM crops are safe, within the bounds of epistemological discussion on the nature of science and experimentation.
Dude calm down it's just a plant.
It would be a shame if people started trivializing human life.
ReplyFunniest caption I've seen in a while.
Idk, reading the book "the green zone" made me appropriately frightened of ebola. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of rational people aren't really all that afraid of a lot of these. I mean, most people aren't dumb enough to go "'Genetically modified'? That must mean it's bad and deserves to be the target of my fears!" or to believe that cloning is something to be frightened of since most people realize it has far more beneficial implications than just randomly, pointlessly churning out copies of people; of course, maybe if making babies the old fashioned way wasn't so damned boring and unpleasant...
ReplyNever assume that everyone else is as smart or rational as you.
You say that 'most people' aren't dumb enough to be afraid of GM foods or cloning. How do you know? Are you basing this on you and your friends? Or people on the internet? There are a whole lot of people out there who get their news from the TV, the tabloids or radio loudmouths. People will believe what they are taught to believe, and if they're given no reason to doubt what they're taught, they won't. Especially if what's true is contradicted by what *feels* true.
WRT #1, Apparantly there is a 60-90% chance that Terrorists will acquire and use chemical, biological and radiological by 2040...
ReplyI LOVE how you put the french flag under "poor countries with bad sanitation"... very subtle.
ReplyActually, I'm more afraid of world dominating conspiracys involving governments, illuminati, really big companies, aliens and the billionairs of the world than of any of these 5 topics :-P
Then you're even dumber than the audience for this article. Go wash your tinfoil hat, I can smell it from here!
I believe he was being sarcastic.
Not for nothing but I would eat the f**k out of a cloned steak.
ReplyI love how they showed the Flying Spaghetti Monster in this article. That just brightened my day a little bit. (:
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesALL HAIL THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You're among friends my fellow Pastafarian
Screw the flying spagetti monster, All Hail the HypnoToad!!!
Why are all these comments voted down?
My bio teacher worked at some pharmaceutical lab when he was a student. He said that it was pretty much already known by everyone in the lab that humans have been illegally cloned by different labs and companies.
ReplyI hope you reported him to the school board!
WTF am I getting thumbed down for? I'm just telling you guys what he said. Plus I live in Russia, there are less regulations here involving restrictions on medical sciences, what the hell would you guys know?