Summary Response Today I read LET’S STOP SCARING OURSELVES by Michael Crichton. It is about a man who is taking a look back at his life and the different views that have captivated the country, and even the world, over his lifetime. He talks about the different scares like how power lines caused radiation that would cause cancer, how we would run out of natural resources like oil and gold by 1993, and how the population would be at 14 billion by 2030 which would cause starvation and famine before that. Each of these claims turned out to be nothing soon after they were publicized. Most people feared these things and would take drastic measures to avoid them, only to find out that they didn’t even exist in the first place. The author did a great deal of research on these topics, each of them being debunked soon after being publicized. By writing about this, he shows his experiences in his life and how many people have changed their lives to avoid these “fears” that don’t even exist. Some events, like Y2K, even caused people to sell their houses and take all their money out of the banks in order to avoid the disasters that would soon consume the world. He also talks about the fear of global freezing in the 1960s, which soon turned into a fear of global warming. I agree with the author when he says that it is freeing to not worry about these issues. They cause added stress to the believers, stress that should not be on them because they cannot do anything about the issue. The author also talks about the population crisis, which said that the population of the world would have been over 14 billion by the year 2030, which is predicted to be 6 billion by 2030 now. This is an issue that no one can do anything about. People are going to have however many kids they want to have and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
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