awful television
So as part of my continuing commitment to sifting through the detritus of our culture for you... I watched a few episodes of Head of the Class, the mid-80s sitcom about a class of gifted students.
Man, it's exactly the heap of bullshit I remembered. This show annoyed me back THEN, when I was barely a teenager, for getting the ins and outs of being a giftie so WRONG. (Dumb shit like answers at their College Bowl-style academic competitions being atomic weights to six decimal places... 🙄 Shit that made no sense, wasn't funny as satire, and just kinda proved to me that this show was written by the dull but hard-working A/B students who just kinda KNEW some gifties and had no idea what it was actually like to have YOUR BRAIN ALWAYS ON FIRE IN A BAD BUT VERY PRODUCTIVE WAY.)
Anyhow. It was crap, total crap, just hacky dated sitcom garbage. But the interesting part? One of the episodes was about the future. The kids were assigned to do a newscast set in the 2030s.
And they were all proto-doomers. The whole thrust of the episode was that the ex-hippie teacher (the guy who played Johnny Fever on WKRP) was super-optimistic about The Inevitability Of Human Progress and the kids were all convinced we were doomed. EXACTLY like kids today.
The really jarring thing, though?
Everything they were panicking about turned out... sort of all right. Nuclear war. Nuclear power. Acid rain. Pesticides. The ozone layer.
And it does kinda make me wonder about our crop of worries, dire though they are.
Re: awful television, pesticides
@zebratron2084 Completely aside from the way that killing off vast numbers of invertebrates is wreaking havoc on the food web…
Pesticides that screw up bugs by mimicking estrogens and persist in the environment are a slow-moving apocalypse. They feminize fish and frogs, but also birds and mammals. The critters that live submerged in runoff-polluted water just show the signs of it first.
Genetically male seagulls with oviducts are on one hand infertile in the ordinary sense, and on the other hand lay dud eggs that can displace fertilized ones from the ground-scrape nest. (Only 2-3 eggs will fit under gull-mom, and they partner up F/F when there’s a shortage of males.) Again, it’s a case of critters that live in and on our trash being affected first.
Re: awful television, pesticides
I’ve also read that the average quality of human sperm has consistently declined since the advent of estrogen-mimicking pesticides. And at least in in mammals, that decline is heritable in generations which were never exposed themselves. For rats and mice, it takes 4-5 generations for the majority of males to be infertile at birth. They still produce some amount of sperm, but it’s too defective to do its job. We’re approaching that limit among humans, so I expect the genetic bottleneck to become visible within my lifetime.
Shorter-lived species have better odds of out-evolving the problem. Megafauna are not generally *that* short-lived.
Humanity might not entirely solve itself, but we sure are trying.
awful television
@zebratron2084
... why... would you do this to yourself???