"hey why are all the barrier garments like linen shirts or chemises or combinations going away?"
"oh we have more washable fabrics now! you don't need to worry about sweat reaching your outer clothing when you can just chuck it in the washing machine!"
"cool!"
[100 years later]
"so uh all of those new washable fabrics are leaching microplastics into our water, and the constant machine-washing wears garments out faster. they're also not really sturdy enough to be mended, so we keep having to throw them out and now the planet is covered in plastic fabric waste that will never break down. also it turns out that the new washable fabrics hold odor-causing bacteria VERY well. so could we get those barrier garments back please?"
"sorry babe linen now costs $100000/yard and since it's been so long without them, nobody knows how to adapt barrier garments to the current styles anyway"
"..."
"maybe try this new $50 undershirt made of Special Sweat-Wicking Plastic Fabric! :) :) :)"
the Federation itself as a concept is so funny because the founding members are
the Vulcans, who have been friends with humanity for years but don't seem to actually like them all that much, instead regarding them with a sort of perverse fascination usually reserved for virology labs
the Andorians, who were fighting the Vulcans for like a hundred years
the Tellarites, who don't like any of these people and whose cultural trait is arguing, and
humans, whom nobody knew existed until last century when they shot themselves into space on a heavily modified nuke, invented world peace and won a fight with the nearest imperial superpower
like imagine you're the Romulan Empire and these weird monkeys who've barely figured out interstellar travel show up on your doorstep in the equivalent of a shipping container with missiles strapped to it, kick your ass in front of everybody, and then start a friendship club with 3 of your neighbours who all hated each others' guts until like a year ago. now I understand why every Romulan on the show is so angry
Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?
Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.
What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?
Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!
And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.
This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.