YMMV / What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years

• Older Than They Think: A number of people believe this article to be a much more recent publication, due to the surprising accuracy of many of its claims. It actually was published in 1900.
• Values Dissonance: The article includes the idea that all these annoying flies and mosquitoes, along with their breeding grounds in the swamps, marshes, and other wetlands, would finally be completely eradicated. Now scientists are fighting tooth and nail to preserve these areas in order to combat the loss of biodiversity and the protection these areas provide against flooding and coastal erosion. Meanwhile, wetlands and swamps are still being drained, paved over and polluted with alarming speed; and mosquitoes are killed en masse to this day. The loss of mosquitoes would kill off many animals that eat them and without wetlands serious pollution problems would occur to a lot of water supplies. Then again, when diseases like malaria were still endemic in the United States and epidemics weren't unheard of during particularly wet summers, their belief that it will be so is understandable. It wasn't until the development of effective pesticides and wetland flooding control measures that endemics of them stopped being an annual occurrence. They also didn't realize then how important wetlands were for ecological reasons at the time, as stated above.