Ever wanted to freak yourself out? Stay up late at night and read Hiroshima, journalist John Hersey's account of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing and its immediate aftermath. It's 31,000 words––originally filling an entire edition of The New Yorker––and it never fails to send a chill down my spine. The piece, later published as a bestselling book, is a frightening piece of journalism about one of mankind's most frightening inventions... perhaps it's most frightening.
People shared their opinions after Redditor Illurinatil asked the online community,
"People of Reddit, what is the scariest thing you think mankind has ever created?"
"You can't see them..."
"The most terrifying inventions are biological weapons. You can't see them and you die horribly. In the best case, you die within minutes; in the worst, it can take hours or days. Or you don't die and there are permanent damages to you."
The silent killer.
Reading about the Ghouta chemical attack is bound to ruin your day. We apologize in advance.
"Chemical weapons by far..."
"Chemical weapons by far because the effects are limitless and you can engineer the fallout to be global."
"A vicious cycle..."
"A vicious cycle where we have the technology to solve our problems but can't because not everybody can agree on it."
We're doomed, aren't we?
Yeah... we totally are.
"The idea that..."
"Adversarial thinking. The idea that "we are right and they are wrong." This is how every war begins."
"I'm honestly..."
"I'm honestly going to have to go with social media in its current form. Nuclear weapons have chains of command and are kept under lock and key. Some private cannot initiate a nuclear strike but any nitwit can hop on Facebook, Instagram, etc. and fall into the rabbit hole of extremism, believing whatever some @ss tells them due to lack of critical thinking skills, people who know how to exploit social media doing just that, and so forth. And this has happened to millions of people.
I honestly think social media has been a net negative to humankind and that, if it had been invented in the 1940s, we would still have polio crippled people being placed in iron lungs every year."
"Nukes are..."
"Nukes are what kept the planet at peace for the majority of the world based on the understanding that if you get turned to dust in a second you are considered the lucky ones on the receiving end. It is by far the scariest thing mankind has ever created."
Mutually Assured Destruction has indeed kept the world safe... but what happens when someone gets a little too scary and cocky?
Probably shouldn't think of it. I need to sleep tonight.
"I just saw..."
"I just saw a video of a robot controlled by neurons from a rat's brain. So that's alarming."
"The scariest thing..."
"The scariest thing mankind has ever invented is still a secret because if they told us we wouldn't be able to sleep."
"We don't have very much..."
"Antimatter. We don't have very much of it, but the very idea of a substance that can annihilate matter is insane. For that matter, the colliders that can make it. The physics involved are terrifying."
We'll never sleep again.
Sorry if you had a nice, leisurely day planned. Did you really need another reason to think that humans are horrible? To be fair, they make it so easy.
Have some suggestions of your own? Feel free to tell us in the comments below!
Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
@lpeterp/Bluesky
@FPWellman/X
@bobsbeatgmail.com5/Threads