Nightmare fuel: We asked researchers to name the scariest thing you should worry about

What keeps you up at night?

Bank account woes? An impending work presentation? Analyzing that embarrassing thing you said in the seventh grade?

Boring!

To give you something fresh to worry about as Halloween approaches, The Denver Post pulled from the scariest thing we can think of — the state of the world — and asked a slew of smart Coloradans to share what in their field of study truly worries them.

Here’s some fresh nightmare fuel for you, Colorado. You’re welcome.

Antibiotic angst

Samuel Ramsey, a University of Colorado Boulder professor who studies ecology and evolutionary biology, said the world’s over-reliance on antibiotics has the potential for disaster.

By continuously pumping livestock with antibiotics, Ramsey said we run the risk of bacteria, diseases and viruses developing such potent antibiotic resistance that we end up with no effective class of drugs to work as treatment.

“When I say that it keeps me up at night, I’m not exaggerating,” Ramsey said. “It’s one of those things that could really go out of control. We understand the scariness of a viral pandemic… Imagine if we had an epidemic in this country and we just didn’t have anything that worked and hadn’t spent the proper amount of time studying it.”

Sometimes in large factory farms, workers will give antibiotics to all animals to prevent sicknesses, Ramsey said. Some bacteria in these animals survive and become resistant to those antibiotics, he added. Then people working with these animals can get infected, and it spreads.

There are already antibiotic-resistant forms of strep throat, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, ear infections, staph infections and gonorrhea, Ramsey said.

One way regular folks can help this problem is by ensuring they only use antibiotics prescribed to them and take the entire course as instructed by their doctor, not just stopping when they feel better, Ramsey said. Not finishing the prescribed course of the drug could leave bacteria in your system that are now resistant to that antibiotic.

Northern lights or lights out?

The next time you’re granted the celestial treat of spying the dazzling colors of the northern lights in Colorado’s skies, Tom Berger — a CU Boulder solar physicist and director of the Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center — said you should understand that likely means there’s technological mayhem going on below.

“It’s kind of a vibe killer, but it’s true,” he said.

The northern lights are caused by geomagnetic storms in which the sun emits energized particles that slam into Earth’s atmosphere, creating colorful streaks of light in the sky at night. These solar flares can also wreak havoc on Earth’s magnetic field, meaning GPS can go wonky, the power grid is at risk, flights can get disrupted and autonomous vehicles could go haywire, Berger said.

“The biggest thing we worry about is a geomagnetic storm causing enough geomagnetic disturbance that the power grid becomes unstable,” he said.

In a worst-case scenario, a big urban area like New York City or Boston could have a blackout that would result in certain death for large numbers of people, Berger said. Medical devices in hospitals and at home could lose power, he noted, or heat or air conditioning could snuff out during excessive periods of cold or heat.

“Imagine autonomous vehicles during a major geomagnetic storm. They might not be able to find GPS — and then what?” he said.

Luckily, there are smart people across industries who work to prevent technological malfunction during such storms, Berger said.

Don’t bee a problem

Not to be a buzzkill, but people who keep honey bees might be doing more harm than good for the local environment, said Seth Davis, an entomologist and associate professor in Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources.

“Homeowners and folks who think they’re doing a good job to conserve bee health do so by keeping honey bees because they think they are familiar with colony collapse disorder,” he said.

However, when people introduce honey bees to an environment, they’re actually creating competition for native bees, Davis said. Honey bees are extremely savvy pollen collectors, but aren’t always great pollinators, he said. Native bees are far better pollinators.

“It’s an interesting conundrum, because I understand the desire to help… but there’s an informational mismatch in that they don’t understand what they’re doing might be harmful,” Davis said.

Pollination is one of the most important ecosystem services for things like food production and the economic well-being of farms, Davis said.

“If we create a situation where we really outcompete all of our native bees by introducing honey bees into the area, it’s going to make farmers reliant on honey bees for crops that require pollination. which increases the cost of farming,” he said.

Instead, folks who want to help the bees can provide nesting opportunities for them, like drilling holes into an old tree stump. People can also look into what plants native bees in their area enjoy and plant those. If you can tolerate thistle and dandelions in your yard, those are beloved by native bees, Davis said.

Read between the lines

In Colorado, more than 50% of students are not meeting statewide reading expectations, according to Colorado Measures of Academic Success test scores. 

Alfred Tatum, a professor in the School of Education at Metropolitan State University of Denver, has studied literacy development among struggling readers for 30 years.

He called the children’s literacy crisis “a dizzying current” negatively impacting children nationwide. Tatum said the nation has continued to miss the mark in addressing this crisis that has been ongoing for years.

Tatum said there are many variables to untangle as to what is causing the literacy crisis, but that children need teachers with high levels of literacy education competency who make it difficult to fail.

The consequences of the reading crisis are dire, he said. Those who struggle with reading have significantly worse health outcomes. Literacy problems pose a threat to democracy. They predict lower college-going rates.

But what really worries Tatum is when struggling readers begin to internalize a sense of being broken.

“It can happen as early as second grade, and many of these kids start surrendering their life chances before they get to know their life choices,” Tatum said. “They can’t figure out why they can’t get this stuff.”

Without access to words and ideas, children lose a path to language that could shape their trajectory or alter their life outcomes, Tatum said. The struggle to read is bleeding over into other school subjects, making children fall behind in different academic areas, Tatum said.

“There has to be a strategic imperative that we’re going to make it very difficult for kids not to be able to read in this nation, and we’re going to shape policies and practices and support systems that aim to make that happen,” he said.

Does AI know me?

People often ask Casey Fiesler, a CU Boulder information science professor, if their phone is listening to them.

But the reality is scarier, she said.

Small pieces of data about you are constantly shared with and through apps, creating a vast trove of information that paints an eerily accurate portrait through the use of machine learning, Fiesler said.

“Predictive models not only ‘know’ more about you than you directly share, but they might even ‘know’ things that you don’t realize about yourself,” she said.

Fiesler has come across people in her research who say that their TikTok algorithm, for example, figured out they were gay before they did.

“And this will become even more pronounced as we interact more with large language models through chatbots like ChatGPT,” Fiesler said.

Patterns in the way we talk — even in innocuous, unrelated conversations — can inform artificial intelligence to make guesses about highly personal traits. The more data we feed these models, the better they get at guessing, Fiesler said.

“So if you already think it’s scary that your phone might be invading your privacy by listening to your conversations, the scarier reality is that it doesn’t have to,” she said.

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