Safety hasn’t always been a concern if it meant saving a human life or discovering a better future. Throughout the ages all around the world we have used techniques and ideas that proposed the idea of a longer life. But as pleasing as the idea does sound, it didn’t always work. Many people gave their lives to treatments that didn’t work or tried new ideas that actually prevented them from living longer than early adulthood. But as humankind has progressed into a state of being where we are less reliant on hunting and gathering to survive and actually have an excess in profits, we are learning new ways to be safe and live longer. Overtime new developing countries have instituted laws on safety and protection. Many countries, much like the United States, have actually integrated laws about things like seatbelts and pollution as a way to try and keep people safe. But new laws aren’t the only things that make us safer. With new scientific research abilities, we have been able to better understand concepts like pollution and bacteria, while at the same time learning about economic policies and ways to keep people from being poor.

All throughout history, humans have never truly considered what we as a whole have been doing to our environment. While we mainly partake in actions that reflect our need to survive, for a long time frame we did not consider what we were doing to the world around us. In recent times, news reporters and environmentalists have been making influential reports explaining things like pollution and climate change, but the reality is, we are actually more eco-efficient that we were only twenty years ago! In fact, over the last decade, scientists have been working with major cities such as Hong Kong, China and Gwalior, India to decrease the amount of air pollution being produced by large factories, car emissions, and other environmentally harmful products. With their help, and the help of their local communities, “…air quality improvements have enabled many areas of the country to meet national air quality standards set to protect public health and the environment. For example, all of the 41 areas that had unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide in 1991 now have levels that meet the health-based national air quality standard. A key reason is that the motor vehicle fleet is much cleaner because of Clean Air Act emissions standards for new motor vehicles” (“Progress”). With these new regulations now being enforced, cities like Hong Kong are now seeing a smaller amount of air pollution above their city skyline and have the potential to see a completely pollutant-free air in the next several decades. With the decrease in harmful pollutants such as these, the world is actually a safer place. In cities such as these, residents will no longer have to worry about developing life-threatening forms of cancer that they were rushing to treat in the centuries prior to ours.

While the decrease in pollutants across the world has begun to already make the world safer, disease understanding has also had a monumental impact on the way humans have survived on the face of the planet. Thousands of years ago, people all across the world often suffered from epidemics of sickness and disease. Many of these included smallpox, yellow fever, and black death, which in this day and age have been nearly completely eradicated With a better understand on the way bacteria grows, multiplies, and spreads, scientists and doctors have found ways to keep such problems under control. This in turn allows us to live longer. But along with a better defined understanding of these diseases, we now have a way to treat them. In this era, children are often immunized from diseases that were prevalent from before the Middle Ages until the early 19th century.  With these new advancements, a large population of the world no longer has to worry about those diseases and are actually safer from their side effects. New vaccinations allows for humans to both live longer and to have a higher moral being when they are not concerned for both themselves and their loved ones about diseases. With these advancements also mean a larger population. With medications and immunizations, there is an increase in the infant mortality rate and a decrease in the death rate. Unlike the early 19th century, woman now nearly always survive child birth and have children who are strong and healthy enough to survive with them. This advancements allow for the world to be safer from a biological perspective, but it also increases our will and ability to live through near-death experiences.

Crime rates. It’s not uncommon to see the news headlines focusing on topics like murder or kidnappings, but what most people don’t know is that the crime rates have actually decreased over the last few decades. Why? There’s no need! In many countries such as China and Singapore people all throughout the city have a way of making money with skills that they already have. Those citizens have fewer taxes and ultimately make a larger profit, and with profit, comes decreased crime rates. However, there is not free market everywhere in the world. But that does not mean that crime rates have not decreased there. In countries such as the United States new laws and rules have been added regarded arrest and crimes. Along with those laws, the United States has pay checks for the unemployed, which does not influence people to turn to crime because they do not need the money. In many crimes, money or some form of profit is always the thing most wanted by those who commit them. But without a reason to need the money, no one truly has a reason to commit those crimes. According to The Atlantic, “by [the last] decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide. Violent crime decreased by one-third. What turned into a precipitous decline started later in some areas and took longer in others. But it happened everywhere: in each region of the country, in cities large and small, in rural and urban areas alike. In the Northeast, which reaped the largest benefits, the homicide rate was halved. Murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone as the city entered the new millennium” (Ford). With this decrease in recent crime, people should feel safer, yet the news stations and the nightly reporters are the ones that make us feel as though we are in danger the moment we leave our homes. But that’s not true. The safety rate has increased over the last decade due to better security measures and the knowledge to always be alert. This alone makes the world about a thousand times safer than it used to be.

Nothing in the world will ever be on-hundred percent safe, no matter what security measures and awareness campaigns are done. But in today’s world, it is actually much safer than it was about a hundred years ago. Today we have new medical advancements and knowledge that can save lives, we have lower crime rates due to increased protection measures, and on top of that, we are more intelligent than we were a hundred years ago. As we think things through and come close to the end of the last decade, we have made incredible advancements which have changed our outlook on the future of the human race and what the future holds.