51 Lesser-Known But Significant Events That Most People Have Never Heard Of

"Nestle buying up water rights everywhere in the world and not only is no one doing anything about it, but most idiots are also buying single-use plastic bottles to enable them by paying $$ for their own water. Ban Nestle from being allowed any water rights. They can go home to Switzerland and try it there on their own citizens and aquifers."

SomeCollegeGwy said:
"This August a VACCINE for CANCER will begin human trials in the UK using the mRNA innovations from the covid-19 vaccine. It should be able to directly target cancer cells and only cancer cells (much much superior to chemotherapy). A vaccine for Lyme disease has been completed using the same technology. And a vaccine for Malaria has been developed using the same technology."

AnDroid5539 replied:
"One of the silver linings of the pandemic was that it pushed the development of mRNA vaccines ahead by leaps and bounds. Necessity really is the mother of invention, I guess."

"26 September 1983 when a Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, literally saved the whole planet from nuclear war by identifying a nuclear missile attack alarm as false. Everyone owes him their lives today."

"It was in this documentary I saw THE shady World of fast fashion on YouTube. All these mountains of used and unsold clothes from the first world are sold to western Africa. It's a huge business there. They are then sold to vendors who resell them. The leftover clothes are sent to a dump near the ocean and the pile of them is unbelievable. It stretches for miles. The environmental problems the textile industry causes at all levels from pesticides to water use and chemicals in dyes to transport of clothes is one of the number one pollution sources on the globe."

"China, despite not having any sophisticated matching system, is the world's second-largest organ transplant industry in the world. Some human rights scientists noticed that in China one could get an organ donor with a 2-week turnaround. They thought, hmmm, the US with one of the most sophisticated match systems in the world, and the wait list is YEARS - math ain’t adding up. Well, they looked into it - found out there is rampant organ harvesting from political prisoners, and the “disappeared”. Wanna guess where the majority of those organs turned out to be originating from? First the followers of Falun Dong, and secondly the Uyghur population is China’s biggest source of organ harvesting. They were able to back calc how many people must be dying a day to hit that mark compared to in the US. 2 weeks for an organ match… for Uyghur-sourced organs alone the prediction is 25-50 thousand are being murdered annually. Many are being harvested while still alive so they can continue to be a “source”. The followers of Falun Gong? Even higher numbers initially (though this may have flipped by now). And people are claiming no genocide is happening. Bone-chilling."

CompMolNeuro said:
"Bugs. We're losing insect populations at a staggering rate. Those beasties are central to many ecosystems. If there were ever to be a trigger to catastrophic, ecological collapse, then removing the creatures at the bottom of the food chain would do it. That's what's happening all over the world right now."

zeldafitzgeraldscat replied:
"It used to be that when you were driving at night, you would see 1000s of bugs in your headlights, and you would have to stop every so often to clean them all off your windshield."

YeetMeDaddio said:
"People in southern Madagascar have been facing severe drought for the last two years. More than a million left starving."

Emotional_Area_2754 replied:
"From Madagascar and currently in Madagascar rn, I confirm this...

To give more info, we are your typical predatory government state, with high corruption, not a lot of development projects, etc. I am not a huge fan myself of donating money to NGOs as it is often a band-aid solution, that isn’t sustainable, and exacerbates corruption in countries like mine (source: my international development BA and personal experience). But having been to the south myself, and seeing how scarce the resources are. Supporting NGOs that actively distribute food while waiting for the government to take responsibility is the humane thing to do. I linked an NGO that I know is helping out by giving food to the south.

It’s in French: Action contre la faim [action contre la faim] action contre la faim.

The situation: Madagascar is bigger than France in terms of surface which is a fact that not a lot of people realize. We are a biodiversity hotspot, as diverse as Costa Rica, and the south is our very own desert. It’s hard to access, as road infrastructures are poor, and it’s a very dry area, we are on the brink of the first climate change-induced famine. And there is in general no infrastructure such as schools, healthcare, etc. Hope you have a blessed day, it’s so nice to see people care, and one thing that could help is tourism, it’s a beautiful country, I am hoping you guys can google the south of Madagascar, and maybe hop on a flight and boost our local economy. Jokes aside, it’s worth it."

iremovebrains said:
"It's not that people don't know about it, you just can't imagine the scale. The opioid epidemic is extraordinary. Before I started as the medical examiner I was aware but not really aware. A full 30% of my cases are drug deaths. It's a silent genocide. There are no class, race, or religious lines. Just a parade of sick people who never got help for their trauma or mental illness and died chasing a solution for their unaddressed pain."

lowblowbro1 replied:
"For anyone reading this and wanting to know more, I'd really recommend reading the book Dopesick. Horrific actually seeing the stats on what's happened as a result of the Sackler family and their greed. The TV show was incredibly hard to watch but very well done also."

Madmarrdegan said:
"Pol pot wiped out almost a quarter of Cambodia's population during his reign using the Khmer Rouge. He died peacefully in his sleep in 1998, never being held accountable."

Historical_Wash_1114 replied:
"When I was a kid I saw a documentary about Pol Pot and it fu*ked me up for MONTHS! I became obsessed with the country and learned everything I could about Cambodia. Probably the first time kid me saw the true darkness of humanity. I can't even put into words how distraught I was."

"The Carrington Event. It was the most severe recorded geomagnetic storm that happened in the 1800s. It was so powerful it set fires in telegram stations. If we had one of equal strength today it would be catastrophic and, I'm pulling a number out of my a*s here, the death toll would probably be in the millions because of how much most of the developed world depends on power. Hospitals, aircraft, etc. That's on the more extreme end of the course, we get hit by smaller solar flares often and don't even realize."

Frances_E_Farmer said:
"In the Armenian Genocide, around 1 million were killed during WW1 by the Ottoman Empire. Turkey still denies it to this day and the US only just recognized it last year."

skeletorbilly replied:
"If it wasn't for the System of Down even fewer people would know about it. It's just not taught in school."

Reddit user said:
"The Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the world, has been drying up."

Kevin_Uxbridge replied:
"I think you mean 'being pumped dry'."

"It’s not that people don’t know about Hurricane Katrina, it’s that people don’t realize that there are still people who live with its impacts, to this day, and many of their people might not have even been accounted for (Aka, missing). Many of the victims may have been swept out into the ocean, and many of them were bussed to various parts of the country. Many of these people were children separated from their parents, and never heard from again. let that marinate. I’m not saying this to spread conspiracy theories, I’m saying this because we tend to think that New Orleans rebuilt, that people died and that the dust settled. But there are thousands of people who were never accounted for, so we don’t know whether they lived or died. We don’t know how many kids were taken advantage of, or anything."

Coliebear86 said:
"The oldest known plague graves from "The Black Death" 1338-1352ish are in Kyrgyzstan. It is believed yersinia pestis made the jump from animals to people there, then spread across to Europe. It came back about every 50 years and is still around today."

soymrdannal replied:
"I lived in Kyrgyzstan for a short while pre-Covid. Bubonic plague is very much still a thing there, but luckily we have antibiotics to help treat it. People still die of it in extremely rural areas, though."

GreatJothulhu said:
"Witch Hunting in Africa."

sometimesagreat replied:
"People with albinism are targeted and their body parts are highly prized by witch doctors."

"Both foreign and domestic massive companies are buying massive swaths of residential real estate, sometimes entire towns' worth, causing rent prices to soar and obliterating the possibility of homeownership for young adults. The US and Canada have taken steps to try to prevent this, but in the US the fastest fix to stop a takeover is actually HOAs making rules against rentals."

"Modern-day slave markets in Uganda. Humans being sold for $14."

syzygy_is_a_word said:
"Ongoing and hugely important: the global NPK fertilizer shortage. NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) fertilizer is essential for modern agriculture, and around a quarter of the global supply used to come from Ukraine and Western Russia. Because of the war, Ukraine isn't making any, and ships aren't putting into port in the Black Sea to get out of Russia. A lot of countries absolutely depend on fertilizer from Russia to even achieve subsistence-level farming, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but in India. China and Brazil are pretty big consumers too and Brazil is one of the largest food exporters. So by this fall, thanks to Putin's war, we're likely to see food shortages and famine across a lot of the planet."

Xirenec_ replied:
"Also, Ukraine was producing huge amounts of world neon supply(supposedly over half of it), and it is needed for something in chip manufacturing."

JaThatOneGooner said:
"There is a civil war in Myanmar (formerly Burma) between a Junta coup and the people who are anti-junta. The Junta is responsible for the coup that saw the deposition of a popular democratically elected politician."

Philosophical_gump replied:
"It is insane what has happened/is going on there. The whole military Junta was in control for decades, followed by voluntary democratic reform (with the cooperation of a woman who was jailed for 15 years and is a Nobel Peace Prize winner) only to be followed by the most recent coup. I remember watching that fitness instructor video on youtube where the military vehicles roll down the street in the background when the coup started. But the real tragedy is the campaign of ethnic cleansing/genocide being carried out on the Rohingya people. A Muslim minority ethnic group. Even the now deposed Nobel peace prize winner has now been accused of ignoring/being complicit with the genocide."

"There's a current civil war in Ethiopia that has left approximately 600,000 dead since the beginning of 2018. It is a vicious war where both sides have been accused of forcing civilians to fight with very little training."