I have never thought about airports like this before, but yeah.
Other thing that inspires awe in me:
It not quite the same thing as the seamless, multiple fail safes workings of an airport, but it is still a tremendous display of cooperation and care for others.
Smallpox no longer exists. We managed, through years of science and collaborative effort, to completely eradicate a disease. This is probably the only extinction that humans have caused that I'm happy about.
Was there luck involved in that smallpox doesn’t have any reservoirs outside of humans and no carriers? Yes, but still, it is absolutely awe inspiring.
Disclaimer that I’m not at all an expert on this topic, most of this is taken from Wikipedia
Smallpox was (was!) a disease that stalked humanity since at least 1500 BCE in egypt and the last known case was in 1978 in a laboratory, the last one in the wild in 1977.
While Smallpox had two variations, it was still an incredibly dangerous disease, with the more dangerous variety having a 30% mortality rate. Smallpox also left scarring from pustules behind that could lead to blindness. In the last 100 years of its existence it killed approximately 500 million people, with 15 million cases (I’m assuming infected, not just dead) as recently as 1967.
Inoculation against smallpox has actually been done before, as contact with scabs and pustule fluid leads to less severe infections, although it still carries a risk if being infectious. Cowpox, a related but less severe disease, also renders people immune to smallpox and as such became the first proper, vaccine against smallpox. Interestingly enough, inoculation, whether by vaccine or variolation, against smallpox wasn’t even much of a weird thing and very much precised in larger scale. There were efforts made to vaccinate large amounts of the population, even before the disease was fully understood or a vaccine as we know it today had been created.
A lot of different states and countries actually made vaccination against smallpox mandatory. The first wider, truly large scale efforts to eradicate smallpox were made in 1950, albeit with too little funding. The amount of people that died each year was at 2 million at this time.
The next efforts were started in 1967 and missed their goal to eradicate smallpox in 10 years by only 9 months.
The entire project required global cooperation and coordination. It required funding, initial donation of vaccine doses, which later got produced in developing countries, where they were needed and coordination and communication between not just just world leaders but also authoritys in the regions, doctors and the population.
It is absolutely amazing that we managed to defeat a killer that is far more deadly than us, managing to kill 3 times more people than we manged through our wars in just the last 100 years. The horror that stalked us for so long, slaughtered young and old, rich and poor no longer exists, except in two sealed labs.
The eradication of smallpox is, in my opinion, an amazing feat of human ingenuity and cooperation.
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