The Dirtiest Animal

Way more people know who the fictional Jon Snow of Game of Thrones is than the John Snow who proved people shouldn't contaminate water and then drink that contaminated water--in 1854! That's really not long ago at all for what seems like the most basic bit of information that every human should know, but incredibly even this piece of foundational information is totally lacking.

The contemporary solutions to the problems of keeping people and cities clean and keeping drinking water clean are really pretty bad: they're extremely resource and energy intensive. As an example, some articles calculated that the cost of replacing Flint, Michigan's water supply lines was more than the appraised value of all the homes in the city. There are hundreds of communities in the United States in the same boat. Replacing just the water line to a single small house in the United States costs thousands of dollars. Replacing shared utility lines is proportionately more expensive.

Unfortunately in most places in the world, cities aren't capable of maintaining a high level of hygiene, hell, they can't maintain a low level of hygiene. Even the United States has outbreaks of disease caused by homeless populations in cities. I think it's a pretty safe bet that disease, not war, will wipe out a huge chunk of the human population in the next decades.

Think about how the problems attracting the most investment today are superfluous bullshit, e.g. self driving electric cars, while the bottom of the United States rots out. Incredible.