Tho I must admit that I would never get that close to the surface with my bare hands while doing this.
Piranhas are one of those things I thought I’d need to worry about when I was young.ike quick sand and properly identifying if something is good or fool’s gold.
Don’t forget how to put yourself out if you spontaneously combust, and acid rain.
acid rain was legit, then the world’s governments actually did something about it and it became not a thing. Much like the hole in the o-zone (at least until Elon’s vanity satellites start failing at a high enough rate to decimate the o-zone) and how we could mitigate climate change if there was political will
Acid rain is real. So is quicksand. Either of them being common and severe hazards experienced across the entire US (and maybe elsewhere, I don’t know what the rest of you were taught in gradeschool), not really.
Real acid rain causes mass ecological damage through relatively subtle increases in acidity over several exposures. The way we learned about it in school, whether they meant to or not, came across like concentrated hydrochloric acid was going to rain from the skies and melt human flesh on contact.
The solution to acid rain actually made climate change worse. Well, not directly, just that it turns out that the sulphurs in the atmosphere that caused acid rain were also cooling the planet. With that gone, heat went up quite significantly, and research is being done now to see if we can put that back again much higher and in a more controlled way to regulate temperatures down a bit. We could add additions to airplane fuel, for example, that will disperse it throughout the atmosphere
Mine was wilderness survival, which I think would still be a thing if cell phones weren’t as advanced as they are with GPS navigation, emergency dialing and location.
I know it still happens and is still a very needed skill specially for those who live out in low populated areas, but I genuinely thought that being lost or stranded in the woods was a super common thing. Like needing to start a fire, finding water and hunting to catch food was definitely an experience I would one day have to go through even though I grew up in a large city and didn’t have a reason to go off the grid often aside from occasional shore fishing.