In no particular order, here are some big problems we don’t really think about!
8 - Short attention spans A Microsoft consumer study claims that the
human attention span is getting shorter!
Researchers in 2015 found that people generally lose concentration after around 8 seconds,
down from 12 seconds when the same study was done in 2000.
Guess what the attention span is for a Goldfish?.........9 seconds.
Yeahhhhh.
Researchers in Canada surveyed participants and studied the brain activity by using electroencephalograms.
There are quite a few people out there opposing the study, but numbers don’t lie!
It’s just a fact that we simply can’t hold our attention down nowadays!
It seems like we’ve adapted our attention span to this new mass flow of information.
We had to figure out how to deal with the constant bombardment of information, so we
shortened our attention span from 12 seconds down to 8 seconds to help us, prioritize,
and consume information quickly and efficiently.
Ahhhhh, but there’s a twist!
In 2017, BBC decided to look deeper into the research.
Essentially, they weren’t able to find any actual records that backed up the stats!
Maybe the Microsoft study was just fake news.
However, even if there isn’t scientific evidence to back up the evidence of shortening
attention spans, what we can say for certain is that there are a LOT more people constantly
checking their phones for notifications.
And this may be taking its toll.
Is it just me, or does it seem like people are just itching to check out what’s new
on Instagram or facebook all the time?!
7 - Electric car batteries The drive to replace pollution causing gasoline
and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has gathered much momentum.
Who hasn’t noticed all the new Teslas out there today?
But there’s an unanswered environmental question at the heart of the electric car
movement: what on earth are we supposed to do with the half-ton lithium-ion batteries
once these cars are done on the road?
The number of electric cars in the world passed the 2 million mark in 2017, and the International
Energy Agency estimates that there’ll be 140 million electric cars globally by 2030
if countries meet Paris climate agreement targets.
This electric vehicle boom could leave 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries
in need of recycling between now and 2030!
In the EU, as few as 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled.
This has an environmental cost.
Batteries carry a risk of giving off toxic gases if they’re damaged.
There just may not be a business model in recycling these electric batteries.
The materials in a lithium-ion battery pack are relatively inexpensive, and even with
technological breakthroughs, it’s estimated that only 20 percent of the cost of recycling
could be recouped by selling the recovered materials.
The answer might lie in re-using batteries rather than recycling car batteries.
Car batteries can still have up to 70% of their capacity when they stop being good enough
to power electric vehicles, making them perfect for functions such as home energy storage.
6 - Too Much Chair There’s one devious evil that modern society
exposes us to.
It’s associated with a 18 percent increased risk of heart disease, 17 percent increased
risk of cancer and 91 percent increased risk of getting Type 2 diabetes.
What exactly is the evil that I’m talking about?
It’s called sitting!
And we’re doing farrrr too much of it.
The idea that sitting is harmful seems pretty ridiculous at first thought right?!
Sitting is a default human body posture – or is it??
Actually, no aspect of the human musculature is naturally supportive of sitting.
Sitting essentially came about because of the modern civilization we’ve built, and
worse, there’s almost no escaping it!
We now sit longer than ever before, with the average office worker sitting up to 15 hours
a day!
I actually just stood up right now!
Your everyday non-exercise activities, such as standing, walking and even fidgeting, still
burn calories.
This energy expenditure is known as non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT for you acronym
lovers out there.
The lack of NEAT is a big and important risk factor for weight gain!
Sedentary behavior, such as sitting or lying down, severely limits the calories you burn
through NEAT, and is the cause of weight gain for many people!
Are you trying to lose fat or keep it offt?
Don’t be sitting all the time!
If you have no choice but to sit for work, then obviously make sure you get some physical
activity throughout the day, such as just walking around the office.
And don’t forget the essential, which is hitting the gym!
5 - Fertility rates Initially, reduced child dependency rates
were actually beneficial to economic growth.
By delaying childbirth, men and women could start an education and start their careers
before having families, while paying more in income taxes and enjoying the benefits
of having more money.
Increased spending power creates demand, which stimulates job growth – and the economy
benefits in the short-term.
But long term?
There’s a problem.
Worldwide fertility rates began to fall substantially in the mid-1960s.
While each country has its own underlying causes for this, it’s interesting that in
developed and developing nations, the downward trend is similar.
So here we are in the 21st century, with the global total fertility rate at just 2.36 births
per woman – roughly half what it was around 50 years ago.
If the world has too many elderly dependents and not enough workers, the burden on economic
growth will be difficult to overcome.
We’re beginning to see a substantial imbalance in the ratio of elderly dependents to working-age
people, which will only intensify over the coming decades.
By 2100, the U.N. predicts that nearly 30% of the population will be made of people 60
years and older.
Life expectancy also continues to increase steadily, which means those dependents will
be living even longer.
Health care costs for the elderly will strain resources, while the smaller working population
will struggle to produce enough income tax revenue to support these rising costs.
It's likely this will cause spending power to decrease, consumerism to decline, job production
to slow, and the economy to stagnate.
4 - Bees Did you guys know that Bees are actually disappearing?
Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees
in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen.
Well…..at least supposedly they leave plenty of food and a few nurse bees to care for the
remaining immature bees and the queen.
But really, the question is, where would we be without bees?
As far as important species go, they’re on top of the list!
Bees are essential to pollination.
They pollinate 70 of the roughly 100 crop species that feed NINETY PERCENT of the world.
In the last half decade alone, 30% of the national bee population has disappeared and
nearly a third of all bee colonies in the U.S. are gone.
The estimated monetary loss is a colossal 30 billion dollars a year!
We’re losing bees at an alarming rate.
Possible reasons include the loss of flower meadows, the crab-like parasitic Varroa mites,
and the use of certain pesticides.
Another probable factor in the US is the widespread practice of feeding bee colonies on industrialized
bee farms with high fructose corn syrup instead of its natural self-made food honey.
We may start losing the plants that bees pollinate, the animals that eat those plants, and so
on up the food chain.
A world without bees is going to struggle to sustain the growing global human population
of 7.6 billion people!
3 - Human population No species has altered Earth’s natural landscape
the way that we have.
Our growing population, coupled with rising affluence and per capita impact, is driving
our planet closer to its tipping point.
With population expected to reach nine and a half billion people by 2050, our planet
doesn’t have the biocapacity to sustain our current levels of growth and resource
consumption!
One way to address the challenges associated with future projections is to look at current
human impact on the planet.
We have to look at our ecological footprint.
Ecological footprint tracks how much biological capacity there is and how much biocapacity
people use.
Essentially it’s looking at the rate at which we consume natural resources and generate
waste to our planet’s ability to replenish those resources and absorb waste.
Today, our global footprint is way over what mother nature can replenish!
Mother nature would need to replenish resources 1.6 times faster to sustain our current population.
If current trends continue, mother nature would need to replenish 3 times as fast by
the year 2050!
2 - Bird strikes Each year, bird strikes cost airlines worldwide
an estimated $1.2 BILLION dollars.
Of course, as you can imagine, only a part of those costs are from the actual damage.
The rest comes from flight delays and cancellations.
A single bird is rarely dangerous, but multiple bird strikes or hitting large birds such as
Canada Geese, can cause serious accidents.
Engines are actually designed to withstand at least one bird.
In case you’re actually getting really worried, pilots can still fly a plane with just one
operating engine.
As far as no operating engine…..yeah.
Don’t worry, the chances of an accident are still slim.
Between 1990-2015 there were 160,894 bird strikes on US aircraft.
Only a tiny percentage of those strikes resulted in an accident, .025 percent to be exact,
which translates to 40 accidents.
The vast majority of bird strike incidents take place during take-off and landing, although
birds have been occasionally hit at higher altitudes.
Aircrafts are designed and built to withstand bird strikes and pilots undergo rigorous training
to enable them to deal with the eventual nature of a bird strike.
The most notable recent example of a serious bird strike was 2009's US Airways Flight 1549,
dubbed the “Miracle on the Hudson”.
The plane had just taken off and was travelling at roughly 250 miles per hour when the plane
encountered a flock of Canada geese.
The birds, travelling at about 50mph, were sucked into both of the plane’s engines,
which flamed out and failed immediately.
Barely minutes after taking off, the plane had to do an emergency landing on the Hudson
river.
1 - Overfishing Overfishing occurs when more fish are caught
than the population can replace through natural reproduction.
Gathering as much fish as possible may seem like a profitable practice, but overfishing
isn’t sustainable and has serious consequences.
The results not only affect the balance of life in the oceans, but also the social and
economic well-being of the coastal communities who depend on fishing for their way of life.
Increased fishing efforts over the last 50 years as well as unsustainable fishing practices
are pushing many fish stocks to the point of collapse.
More than 30 percent of the world's fisheries have been pushed beyond their limits and are
in need of strict management plans to restore their stock.
Several important commercial fish populations, such as bluefin tuna, have declined to the
point where their survival as a species is threatened.
Fishing for specific top predators, such as tuna and grouper, is changing marine communities.
This leads to an abundance of smaller marine species, such as sardines
and anchovies.
Here’s what’s next!