Do you remember yourself at 14-years old? If someone asked you then what you thought you'd be like in 10 years, you'd probably say something like, "I bet I'm gonna grow a sick beard and work out and get super strong and never stop fucking!" Well look at you now: Single, unemployed, and the closest thing you have to a 'sick beard' is that diseased-looking splotchy collection of neck hair you keep forgetting to shave. In short, you are a massive disappointment to your younger, more idealistic self.
That's sort of how the world is, too. With the first decade of the 2000s out of the way, we decided to find a bunch of predictions people of the past had about life in the 2000s. We wish we didn't, because, cousin, we fucked up. For almost every prediction our ancestors made for us, we not only dropped the ball, but we stomped on it, spit on it, poured syrup on and ate the shit out of the ball. The only thing more depressing than how awesome the predictions were? They're all totally doable...
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The Natural World: Man Goes Nuts on Nature
![6 Insanely Awesome Things The 1900s Thought We'd Have by Now]()
What They Predicted:
![6 Insanely Awesome Things The 1900s Thought We'd Have by Now]()
People at the turn of the century fully expected that mankind would have utterly devastated the natural world by now. They envisioned an Earth with no wildlife whatsoever remaining, save for what we specifically bred and protected. And they had a word to describe this barren, lifeless wasteland:
Awesome.
![6 Insanely Awesome Things The 1900s Thought We'd Have by Now]()
Apparently the people in the past were pretty sure we would've finally gotten our shit together and won the war against Mother Nature that we all forgot we were waging. They saw a future where there were literally "no Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly." They not only thought we would have intentionally burned, paved over, and chemically sterilized all the world's marshland, but look at how they thought we'd reduce the house-fly problem: "The extermination of the horse." The horse. As in, the collective horse. The entire species.
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