I was born in 2000. I’ve always heard that Y2K was just dramatics and paranoia, but I’ve also read that it was justified and it was handled by endless hours of fixing the programming. So, which is it? Was it people being paranoid for no reason, or was there some justification for their paranoia? Would the world really have collapsed if they didn’t fix it?
In: Technology
If you hear about a thing engineers/programmers/scientists flip out about widescale for real and then nothing happens, it is usually because people worked their asses off to make sure things get fixed.
Examples:
Acid rain: was a big deal. It still is, but WAY less so because regulations were done. Basically airborne polutants would get mixed in the sky with rain and would have more acidity, damaging structures and crops over time.
Y2K: was a big deal. Remember recently when airlines, banks, some HOSPITALS, etc. went down because of a bad update that wasn’t vetted right? Well think that, but larger scale and harder to fix if we tried to do it after the fact. Computers wouldn’t have been able to correctly do their job and even in 2000 that would’ve had negative impacts that would’ve caused cascading issues (supply, travel, medical) for a good while. We wanted to avoid that so people worked hard to do so.
Ozone layer: CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The ozone layer is helpful by being protective. We need it but we were breaking it. CFCs however were super useful, so they were everywhere. By “panicking” and actually acting somewhat fast, regulations got put into place to ban/regulate CFCs. You could even look on your hairspray/etc. to see if that no-CFCs label was there!
There are a couple of upcoming software “bugs” like the Y2K one that people are working on fixing now!
Did the media overhype any of these? I think occasionally tv did them a disservice (like the King of the Hill episode. Nothing happened because people made sure nothing happened!) but people going out and panicking is…..apparently what people like to do. Ex: Y2K, everyone went and bought all the tp. COVID-19 made people go and buy all the tp. Port dock worker strike, everyone went and bought all the tp.
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