Oh, my. I hadn’t even noticed how much less I’ve had to clean my Windshield lately. That is a very bad sign…
It’s been a couple years since I’ve had to scrape the bugs from my windows.
I had to last week. It was the first time in years.
In Sacramento I clean mine almost daily. Just depends where you are really. Lots of farm land will always have lots of bugs.
Let me give another example:
Traveling from Central Europe to Southern Europe to spend your holiday. In 1980/1990 you had to clean your windshield a couple of times when driving there.
Not any more.
Unless they use shit-tons of insecticide. The farms around my home-town did, or started too a bit before I left.
Waaiiittt… How fast you need to go to get flies on your windows? I think my place has much more flies but i never saw this thing
Couldn’t that also be new improvements in car aerodynamics where bugs simply glide off instead of getting squished?
Apparently, it’s the other way around, presumably because unaerodynamic cars pushed around a big air cone, which deflected the insects.
I’m 51, I spent the 90’s in Louisiana, and since my wife doesn’t fly, we have driven across the USA more times than we can count. In the 90’s, if you didn’t have a bug screen on your grill, the LoveBugs would clog your radiator and you would over heat. You also needed the windshield scrib and squeegee to scrub off the bug splatter every time you filled up. Now, you don’t need either of them.
I have been thinking about this recently. How much of this is lack of bugs vs aerodynamics. I mean back in the day we all drove big rectangles. I’m not denying the fact that it could be a mass extinction of bugs. Just curious.
Nope, seems to purely be the mass extinction thing. In fact:
modern cars hit more bugs, perhaps because older models push a bigger layer of air – and insects – over the vehicle.
Same in Europe.
Drove a ton in the 90s all across the US as well every year there was a couple several thousand mile vacations starting from near Kansas city.
The bugs were bad, but we never needed a bug screen on the grill. I never even remember seeing something like that exist, actually. Definitely less bugs now, though.
Lucky. I-10 could get ridiculous between the black cricket things, the love bugs, the dragon flies, etc.
This has bothered me for years. It’s a really strange thing to be telling younger relatives about how you legitimately could not drive any substantial distance without windshield cleaner at certain times of year. I remember them being plastered across the front edge of the hood and against the radiator after a long trip.
It’s one of the most visibly different things about the world today, IMO, and it’s a little eerie.
The sounds, too.
I was talking with my dad walking near to a place that had frogs croaking, and he got a little emotional and excited to hear them over the phone. Normally it’s just traffic noises now, and silence.
I remember the wasps always buzzing around the vehicle grills munching on all the dead bugs too. Now it’s just shiny and chrome.
I still remember 10 years ago when I was driving on the Autobahn at 130 km/h and a juicy bug hit the windshield. It was literally a loud splat. Besides the grill always being covered in bugs.
Hasn’t happened since, nowadays I can count the number of bugs on the grill with one hand. And that’s after months of driving.
Whoa, this is disconcerting. My folks used to run a rental car agency and I helped out every now and then by cleaning cars. I remember cleaning so many bugs off of cars 20ish years ago, and now on my own car - barely nothing. :(
Idk but I’m reminded of the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine. One of the great achievements of our civilization was an advanced AI with all of our collective knowledge that you could converse with. Feels like our AI tech is on track to get there by the time we start dying off en mass lol
There are quite a few wonderful stories about the AIs continuing after humans are gone. “For a Breath I Tarry” by Roger Zelazny, and the whole of the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, are some great ones.
That being said one of the critical points of “For a Breath I Tarry” is that the machines are just doing what they’re programmed to do, maintaining the infrastructure for no one and just sitting in their orbits keeping the power grid going and all, and are actively hostile to any effort to bring the humans back because that would make things complicated and isn’t in their programming (since although superficially they can converse and act “intelligently,” more so than humans, they can’t really grasp the purpose of things.) Also, “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson is another perfectly realistic one.
Honestly, having a world that’s just alone and empty, but not “abandoned”, sounds so soothing to explore, so liminal
Until insanity set in, but until then I’d have alot of fun just exploring the place for a while
“Slow Music” by James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon is another very very good story that’s exactly like that. Very liminal you could say; lots of going around alone in a world that’s all empty but still all well maintained and functional.
Some explorations for you: (steam links for reference, but I recommend going into all of these blind, don’t read a lot of reviews)
Even if the AI can’t converse well, there will not be many humans around to have human conversations so it will seem a normal chat.
We could put two in front of each other and let them ping pong nonsense for all eternity.
I see you, too, saw the 24/7 live Biden-Trump “debate” Twitch stream.
Trump: “I got better things to do, like stuffing my pee-hole with tic tacs, or having syrupy sex with a maple tree. Anyone else got anything to say?”
This is one of the best things I’ve seen on the internet so far
I’m [emotionally*] ready for the hyper-industrialized moon-scape our planet will become once our environment completely collapses. I think there will be a point past which any environmental protection measures will be useless because there’s nothing left to protect so industrial landscapes will become the norm.
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I’m so dopey. I thought this was suggesting that we’d invented some clever formulation to stop dead bugs sticking to windshields in 2020 and that we’d all have fully autonomous cars by 2050.
What is it about then 0_o ?
It is about how the death of the insects is a precursor to the death of the rest of us. In the 90’s, there were a lot more bugs in the world, and it was very noticeable on road trips. They’re all gone now.
I was outside, next to a park on a lake, and I mentioned to someone the lack of ambient bugs. He was insistent that there were bugs around somewhere but it took me several minutes to locate ONE and it was the only one I could find.
No dragonflies, ladybugs, bees, wasps, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers… I couldn’t even see any ants, flies, or mosquitos. The one I found looked similar to a gnat. It’s spring here. There should be bugs.
I don’t know where all of you live, but my windshield is still an aria of death in the spring of 2024.
Same
Same
It is probably because newer cars are more aerodynamic and the bugs just fly over
That’s a very small part of it. Most of it is that we’re destroying our surrounding ecosystem with multiple different pressures.
My parents never gave me money unless I worked for it and washing their cars was one of those few things they did pay me to do. I remember always having to scrub bugs off the front, it was the hardest part. I’ve literally never washed my road cars because its just dust.
My parents never gave me money unless I worked for it
my road cars because its just dust.
I’m sorry. I legitimately can’t tell if this is satire or not…
What are you confused about? Some cars I’ve owned cannot go off road, maybe a bumpy dirt road here and there. Other cars I have owned I bought specifically because I needed them to go where there isn’t pavement or even a road. They get a lot dirtier and need cleaning just to stay functional.
Well, It sounded like you had more than a few cars, like currently. Which I found in stark contrast to the rest. Now i’m not confused, thanks!
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👀
Do you need medical attention…?
Testicles diarrhea
Well this took a sharp turn
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Sorry, can someone explain? If there are less bugs, that’s attributable to something I should know?
Do you convert dead organic matter into fertile soil or pollinate flowers? They do. If insect populations were to vanish, so would humans. They perform too many vital functions that humans cannot.
Yes… Sorry, I didn’t mean I didn’t understand what bugs do or why they’re important. I just was trying to understand the meme. I was not aware that there’s universally less bugs. I haven’t seen this covered in news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
TW: this entry can be hard to read.
Thank you.
I don’t have a good source and I think it may be a more complex, but at least in Germany various media have frequently cited a number of 70% insect biomass decrease over the last 50 years or so. As a biologist, I wouldn’t be surprised if isn’t even more if you compare it to preindustrial times and the decrease in biodiversity is probably much higher as well.
OP literally never leaves the city.
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Have they built it up a lot while you were living there?
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I’m not in the city right now. The key word in my post was “attributable.” As in, what’s causing the phenomenon?
