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Why Didn't the First Earth Day's
Predictions Come True? It's
Complicated
Half a century ago, scientists and activists
predicted utter doom for the planet. That hasn't
happened yet, but it's nothing to cheer about
The first Earth Day was revolutionary. That can be difficult to imagine today as we’re bombarded by calls for sustainability year-round. Yet only 46 years ago, some 20 million Americans protested and demanded that the government curb pollution, protect wildlife and conserve natural resources.
Remarkably, government leaders listened. In the years after the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, among other powerful environmental laws. In short, Earth Day changed the trajectory of our country and, probably, the world.
Environmental scientists led the movement, predicting chilling futures—that overpopulation would cause worldwide famine; pollution would blanket cities and kill thousands; a mass extinction was upon us; oil and mineral reserves were about to run out. Nearly all of these predictions foresaw doom by the year 2000—which we’re now far past. While environmental concerns still reign, the extreme conditions predicted 46 years ago have, for the most part, not yet materialized.
It’s easy to poke fun at these “failed predictions”—and many environmental skeptics do. Those critics aren’t entirely wrong; some of the era’s predictions were based on faulty logic. But others failed to come true because the predictions themselves changed the course of history.
Running Out Of Everything
Many of the era’s incorrect predictions centered on resource scarcity—oil, minerals, food—but perhaps the most famous one came ten years after the first Earth Day, when a scientist and economist made a public bet that lives on in environmental discourse today.
The scientist was Paul Ehrlich, an outspoken biologist whose studies on the population dynamics of butterflies led him to a dramatic conclusion: That the
human population was too big and soon would strip the world of resources, leading to mass starvation.
The economist was Julian Simon, who disagreed with Ehrlich. Humans are not butterflies, he argued, and have a powerful tool that prevents resource scarcity: a market economy. When a useful resource becomes rare, it becomes expensive, and that high price incentivizes exploration (to find more of that resource) or innovation (to create an alternative).
The two never met or debated in person. But in 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet in the pages of a scientific journal, and Ehrlich accepted. The biologist selected five raw minerals—chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten—and noted how much of each he could buy for $200. If his prediction was right and resources were growing scarce, in 10 years the minerals should become more expensive; if Simon was correct, they should cost less. The loser would pay the difference.
In October 1990, ten years later, Simon received a check in the mail from Ehrlich for $576.07. Each of the five minerals had declined in price. Simon and his faith in the market were victorious.
“The market is ideally suited to address issues of scarcity,” says Paul Sabin, a Yale environmental historian who wrote the book on the Simon-Ehrlich Wager. “There’s often cycles of abundance and scarcity that are in dynamic relationship with each other where one produces the other.”
Take oil: Repeatedly over the past decades, oil prices have shot up, leading some people to predict peak oil—the end of fossil fuels and the start of an energy crisis. But by market logic, high prices encourage enterprising people to seek new oil sources, develop new extraction technologies, or otherwise invest in bringing oil onto the market. Demand and high prices brought us fracking, for instance, and now gas at the pump is cheaper than ever. Research into the next potential oil technology, extraction of methane hydrates, is already underway.
Similar patterns occur with minerals like copper, one of Ehrlich’s picks from his wager with Simon. At the time of the bet, the price of copper was on the rise, and, as a result, some investors took to copper production, increasing supply, says Sabin. Then in 1977, GE and Bell laid their first fiber-optic phone lines, which carry more information than copper wire. The new technology spread through the 1980s—and by the end of the Simon-Ehrlich wager, demand for copper was down, as was its price.
Each mineral from the bet has its own story, says Sabin, and many involve people. An international tin cartel collapsed, leading to a drop in tin prices. With other metals, strikes and union resistance were sorted out, and prices dropped.
Feeding the Planet
And so on that first Earth Day, people fighting oil spills, power plant pollution, pesticides and litter protested in the streets. The government responded to public outcry, activism and the collective predictions of the era by creating our most powerful environmental laws—the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and others.
“The sense of concern, the feeling of crisis, the agitation and political mobilization associated with [the era’s predictions] interestingly had an effect not on energy or mineral resource production but on control of pollution,” says Sabin. “People like Ehrlich shared a vision that the path that we were on wasn’t a good one, that it was headed towards crisis—and that gave energy and support for the legislation.”
And the regulations have worked. After DDT was banned in 1972, populations of bald eagles and other birds rebounded. Regulations on nitrogen dioxide and particulate pollution have improved air quality in cities alongside children’s lung development. In the late 1970s, 88 percent of American children had elevated lead levels in their blood; after leaded gasoline was phased out, that number dropped to less than 1 percent.
Pollutants continue to cause problems; the horrific case of lead poisoning in Flint show that regulations are not perfect solutions. But those predictions and the resulting activism during the first Earth Day drove change.
The Legacy Lives On
Even though the dire predictions didn’t come to be, they live on in our environmental discourse—and then as now, the most extreme voices get the most attention.
“It is important to acknowledge that there’s a relationship between the past predictions and the current ones,” says Sabin. “They helped feed a dynamic of extremes with both sides bashing each other.”
This is evident in the loudest parts of the climate change discussion. Extremists on one side are certain the world is going to end; extremists on the other are certain everything is fine and climate change is a conspiracy.
The truth is more complicated. Climate change won’t destroy the planet, although it will change the environment we’re accustomed to, in ways we can't predict and with possibly dire consequences. And weaponizing “failed predictions” of the past to justify leaving the climate problem to the market is deceptive. If we don't act because a previous prediction "failed," we face an array of human suffering, which will hit the poorest and disadvantaged the hardest.
“We should try to figure out the relationship between the earlier predictions and the current ones,” says Sabin, “The environmental community and advocates for climate action will be in a stronger position if they can figure out how to
explain why climate change is different [from past predictions of resource scarcity] and why we need to take action now.”
and back to Earth. Exploration Mission-2, when astronauts will travel into deep space in the Orion capsule, is slated for the 2020s.
Among the countless tech challenges that must be met before people can safely go to Mars (and back) is that of protecting astronauts from both cosmic and solar radiation, which in deep space are more potent and thus more harmful than what they encounter even over long periods aboard the space station. So researchers are designing new radiation-shielding spacesuits (Newman herself achieved a measure of geek fame for designing a new spacesuit before joining NASA) and habitats. Another problem way out there, of course, is the lack of stations in deep space, so the agency hopes to develop a solar electric propulsion system for deep-space flight.
If there’s a job that sounds more science fictiony than that, perhaps it’s manhandling an asteroid, a chore that, NASA insists, will yield useful new information about docking spacecraft, collecting extraterrestrial samples and moving multi-ton objects in space. This September, the agency is scheduled to launch a robotic spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, which will fly to within a few miles of a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu, map it for several months and then get close enough to extend a robotic arm to gather a few ounces of surface material, which the craft will return to Earth by 2023. That sample is expected to contain new clues to planet formation and the potential impact of asteroids on Earth, but Newman also notes that “robotic capability is critical to the future and our whole Journey to Mars.”
A subsequent mission, scheduled for late 2021, might remind movie buffs of Armageddon , the 1998 disaster thriller: A robotic spacecraft will make contact with an asteroid, possibly one named 2008 EV5; remove a boulder weighing more than ten tons; and maneuver the boulder to the Moon’s orbit. An astronaut crew will fly to the boulder and collect samples for examination on Earth.
By the 2030s, Newman says, NASA should be poised. “We’ll get to Martian orbit first, safe to say,” she suggests, or perhaps to a Martian moon, “and then the absolute goal is boots on Mars.” For such a voyage, measured in years, astronauts will have to become Earth-independent, devising ways to make fuel, water, oxygen and building materials with whatever resources the Red Planet offers. If that seems as fantastical as Matt Damon growing potatoes in The Martian , Newman shrugs: Astronauts have dined on lettuce and peppers grown aboard the space station.
“Successful exploration in human history—that’s how it’s been accomplished,” she said. “You take what you can with you, but you have to make things and be self-sustaining.”
The NASA Robot That Failed to
Do Its Job
A cautionary tale about the android who just
wasn't suited for the task at hand
It looks so much like an intelligent robot that it hardly seems fair to call it a dummy. For decades it languished in a warehouse at the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber storage facility in Suitland, Maryland, and no one knew what it was. “It used to sit, covered with dust and filthy, in a sort of homemade chair, for years and years,” says NASM curator Paul Ceruzzi. “Everybody, every day would walk past it and sort of chuckle at it. And it’s like, ‘What are we doing with this thing?’”
The mystery was solved when Mike Slowik, a businessman in suburban Chicago, contacted Ceruzzi. In the early 1960s, Slowik’s late father, Joe, an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, created an articulated dummy for NASA, to test astronaut spacesuits. “From that moment on,” Ceruzzi recalls, “I said, well, gee, this is actually pretty important.”
In the early years of the Apollo program, NASA needed an objective way of evaluating different spacesuit designs. The problem was a human subject could offer only subjective impressions, says Joe Kosmo, a retired NASA suit engineer. “I can get in a spacesuit and say, ‘Yeah, it’s a little hard to move...to flex the elbow takes a little more force than that other suit that had the different elbow.’ But I couldn’t give you numbers. I couldn’t tell you the range of the motion and the degrees.”
Joe Slowik’s creation was a hydraulically powered figure weighing 230 pounds, its height adjustable from 5 feet 6 inches to 6 feet 2 inches. Under its aluminum skin a network of nylon tubes circulated oil at a pressure of 1,000 pounds per square inch. The high fluid pressure powered the dummy’s hydraulic activators to move the joints. During testing at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston the dummy was suspended from the ceiling. Standing at a nearby console, an operator could turn knobs to make the dummy’s 36 joints execute remarkably lifelike actions. Sensors measured the precise motion and amount of force exerted by each joint.
“It was impressive on the motions it could make, very humanlike motions,” Kosmo recalls. In a filmed demonstration, viewable below or on YouTube, the android performs leg lifts and arm raises, runs in place, and swivels its hips like a slow-motion Elvis Presley. It could even shake hands. But there was one nagging problem: It leaked. One of the great technical challenges had been that hydraulic valves small enough to use in the dummy couldn’t be made sufficiently strong to handle the fluid pressure required to move the joints of a pressurized
