A lot of things happen over and over in history. There were violent sports well before American football came along. One example, from centuries ago in Europe, would be jousting. American football is a sport of plutocrats, at least at its professional level. Team owners tend to be billionaires, and star players become millionaires, often overnight. Back in the day, jousting was the sport of elites as well. After all, to compete you needed a trusty steed, armor, plenty of free time to train, and probably a staff to handle the little things like polishing your armor and taking care of your horses (because I’ll bet you’d have more than one).
One of the consequences of playing American football is turning out to be chronic traumatic encelphalopathy. It’s a brain injury that leads to erratic behavior, violent tempers, and in some cases like — Junior Seau — suicide. Maybe CTE was a consequence of jousting too; it certainly offered plenty of opportunities to get knocked on the head, and because it took years of practice — like football — the injuries might have built up over time. We’ll never know, but take the example of Henry VIII of England. On January 24, 1536, he was injured in a jousting match. Most modern depictions of Henry VIII show an extremely obese guy, but at the time of his jousting injury he was very active and known for being what we would call “athletic.” But something definitely happened to him after the injury, because although he lived another ten years or so, his behavior got pretty erratic. He got paranoid, started marrying one woman after another, and got involved in a couple of wars without much reason to. So was he suffering from CTE centuries before it was identified? We’ll never know.
We know something about the effects of radiation on human health, but there’s probably a lot more to learn about it. That’s why there are a couple of January 24 incidents that might have future effects with names and diagnoses, but right now we don’t know what they might be. Just like a sixteenth century doctor faced with CTE. One of the incidents happened on January 24, 1960. An American B-52 bomber was doing a routine flight from Johnson Air Force base in North Carolina. They did a midair refueling rendezvous with a tanker plane, and the pilot of the tanker noticed that the B-52 had a fuel leak. They didn’t want to take any chances because the bomber was carrying two actual atomic bombs. They tried to fly in a holding pattern until enough of the fuel was gone that it would be safe to land, but the fuel got worse and the pilots lost control. The crew bailed out, abandoning the plane. And here’s where things get a bit weird. One of the two bombs actually started arming itself, and a later investigation showed it completed three out of four steps in the process.
Atomic bombs — well, at least those atomic bombs — are designed to explode before they hit, and to make things more controllable they have a parachute. One of the bombs — the one diligently attempting to explode all by itself — landed upright in a field. Even though it came close to exploding, it didn’t. But the second bomb acted quite differently. I apparently didn’t go through any sort of arming sequence, didn’t deploy its parachute, and simply hit the ground at full speed. It came apart, as you do when you weigh several tons and fall from a couple miles up. And here’s the weird part: the uranium core of the bomb was never recovered. As far as anybody knows, it’s still somewhere underground in North Carolina, and it’s definitely still radioactive. Refined uranium has a half life that’s pretty long, so wherever it is, that’s where it remains.
The eventual effects of the 1960 bomb incident, if any arise, will at least have a verifiable location; somewhere around Goldsboro, North Carolina. That’s not the case with 1978’s version of a January 24 incident. In 1978 the Kosmos 954 satellite, which was a spy satellite launched by the USSR just the previous year, malfunctioned and reentered the atmosphere, breaking up over northern Canada. And of course the thing was powered by an onboard nuclear reactor, so when it broke up, a whole bunch of the debris was radioactive. The pieces of Kosmos 954 ended up scattered across nearly 50,000 square miles, and teams scoured the area (well, at least to the extent that you can “scour” 50,000 square miles). It’s just possible that there might be some consequences eventually, because they only found 1% of the radioactive uranium from the Kosmos. So if you’re fond of coining new words, you might give some thought to what to call long-delayed effects caused by the best and brightest of the 20th Century figuring out atomic power and then, basically, dropping pieces of it and losing them.
One thing you don’t want to lose, even if you do drop it, is gold. Gold doesn’t have all that many practical uses, but people really want to find it anyway. Or maybe that’s why they want to find it. Either way, January 24, 1848 was the day James Marshall, who was building a sawmill for John Sutter on the American River in California, noticed gold in the river sand. He told Sutter, Sutter told, well, somebody, and before they knew it everybody Sutter had hired for his sawmill had quit to go prospecting for gold. And thousands of others headed for California to try the same thing. Sutter’s mill never got built. Although you’d think that the first two people to discover gold would be, if not the very richest prospectors, at least pretty successful, you’d be wrong. Sutter stayed focused on his sawmill too long, and Marshall abandoned the whole gold project and started a vineyard, which failed. Neither one of them made any money from the gold rush that they kicked off, even though it produced so much gold that it supercharged the economy of the whole country.
When you think about a gold strike, the first idea that comes to mind is probably something about luck — good luck, to be specific. But things can have unexpected, delayed effects, even if at the time they seem like a good thing. James Marshall was working hard at becoming a successful sawmill operator when he discovered gold, and he eventually died penniless. And the effects for the native population of California was much worse. Hundreds of thousands of settlers flooded into the California territory because of the gold, and their seizure of land that people were already living on — sometimes because they thought it might have gold, sometimes just because they wanted it — led to the “California Genocide” that reduced the Native American population from around 150,000 in 1848 to something like 30,000 by 1870. The government, as you might, sadly enough, expect, did absolutely nothing to solve it. In fact Peter Burnett, the first Governor after California became a state, actually said “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”
That amounts to “oh well, nothing we can do.” And you can say that about losing nuclear weapons and organizing a sport that injures its players’ brains as easily as you can say it about genocide. In fact there are a few other current events where that kind of talk is all too easy to find. Identifying just which events those are, I’m just leaving as an exercise — a pretty easy one — for the reader.
