Rejected by Cracked.com, Episode 3

Once again Cracked.com has seen fit to reject another of my articles in favor of "Eight Utter Wusses That Could Kick Your Ass."  Okay, I made that up.  But it has enough grains of truth to make a few gallons of beer.
This time, my article was to be entitled "Six Wonderful Things The Atomic Age Was Going To Bring Us (circa 1945). 
It would have presented a list of the common, optimistic, utopian and dangerously inaccurate predictions of wonderful things that atomic energy was going to give us following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In trying to find the silver lining in that dark mushroom cloud, journalists, public officials, and others who probably should have known better competed with each other to present the rosiest possible future that would be powered by this incredible new energy source. These people were imagining a Jetsons world in the face of technology that, at the time, was only suited to bombing people back to the Flintstones.


The list:

Car Engines The Size Of Aspirins
Miraculous Healing Of Paralysis And Other Debilitations
A Warmer, Cozier Climate
Artificial Suns For Night Baseball & Stuff
That One World Government We All Really Want
An End To War, Which Is Too Terrible To Even Think About

Here is the sample entry I included:

A Warmer, Cozier Climate

The Fantasy
"No airplane will bypass an airport because of fog. No city will experience a winter traffic jam because of heavy snow. Summer resorts will be able to guarantee the weather." David Dietz, "Atomic Energy In The Coming Era"

"Heat will be so plentiful, it will be used to melt snow as it falls." Robert M. Hutchins

Melting the polar ice caps by bombarding them with nuclear bombs would give "the entire world a moister, warmer climate." John J. O'Neill, " Almighty Atom: The Real Story of Atomic Energy"

Reasons For Optimism
Well, obviously, if you can fire up your own goddamn sun anytime it gets cold you can pretty much design the world's climate to your liking. It's not like anything could go wrong, right? Having the power of the sun at your fingertips certainly means you don't have to settle for whatever weather patterns nature provides--with nuclear energy, we can make Mother Nature our bitch. Or ho, sex slave, really submissive wife, prized goat, or any other distasteful metaphor you care to use. We. Have. The. Power.

Humanity!  Fuck yeah!

Why Those Reasons Were Stupid
Well, it turns out that warming up the whole planet might not be such a good thing. Whether you believe in human-caused global warming or not, you have to admit that deliberately making the world warmer, melting the ice caps, raising sea levels, altering ocean currents and causing mass extinctions so we can all have nice picnic lunches with rainbows and shit to look at is possibly short-sighted. Sort of like, well...

The climate-controlled home of the future.