5 Widely-Held Beliefs That Will Be Proved Wrong In Our Lifetimes
Think about a person who lived 1000 years ago. They might have believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe, or that the world was flat, or in the “spontaneous generation” of insects from trash piles and carcasses. Even 100 years ago, most people thought that humans lived on Mars, that splitting the atom was impossible, that bumps on one’s skull could reveal their personality. But nearly every theory they had about the world was wrong.
Today, nearly every theory we have about the world is also most likely wrong. Just like how some geopolitical thinkers thought that the 90s, and the triumph of Western liberalism over the Soviet Union, meant the “End of History”—a foolish belief toppled on the morning of 9/11—some scientists today believe we are just a few formulae away from a “Theory of Everything” that would unify our understanding of the entire universe, from quantum physics to Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In reality, we stand at the brink of a radical new understanding of the world. The cathedral is under attack, the barbarians are at the gate. An intellectual revolution is happening, only occasionally breaching the pages of mainstream publications. While many in the scientific community will viciously protect their current dogmas, here are five widespread beliefs that have a high chance of being obliterated in our lifetimes.
We only ask that you read with an open mind, and consider the following alternative explanations for some of the biggest questions in our universe.
FALSE: The Big Bang Happened 13.8 Billion Years Ago
The Big Bang is one of the scientific community’s most cherished beliefs. It answers one of life’s most pressing questions—how did it all begin?—with a simple-to-understand idea that aligns with the Biblical origin story. Building atop the Big Bang, scientists estimate the current age of the universe to be 13.8 billion years old.
However, we need to remember that mainstream acceptance of the Big Bang is only 60 years old, and that theory is more fragile than it looks. There is lots of evidence that our universe is likely much older than scientists claim, including galactic superclusters that would have taken at least hundreds of billions of years to form (Big Bang-ers respond by claiming that the universe expanded exponentially in less than a millionth of a second, bending the timeline to match their theory). An even more compelling idea is that the Big Bang never happened at all, and that the “red shift,” or increasing distance, between galaxies can be explained by a localized explosion in an infinite universe. In recent years, alternative explanations to the Big Bang have been prominently shared by author Tao Lin, who wrote about them in his 2021 essay “New Cosmologies.”
This is no fringe science. In 2023, The New York Timesreported that one of the first findings from the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, was the “existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology...Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong.”
Watch for the scientific consensus around the Big Bang to unravel over the next decade, until collapsing and resolving into an entirely new paradigm: a much older universe, an infinite universe, or a simulated universe (which is becoming more plausible as we ourselves close in on the ability to simulate our reality through AI).
Further reading: The Big Bang Never Happened by Eric Lerner
FALSE: We’re Running Out of “Fossil Fuels”
Anxiety over “fossil fuels” like oil and gas is one of the biggest fears in our society. Entire movie franchises like Mad Max are based in a near-future hellscape where gangs slaughter each other over the last few drops of gasoline.
This fear is overblown. We are told that the reason for oil’s scarcity is because of its “biogenic” origin: it was created by biological material (i.e. dinosaurs) decaying over hundreds of millions of years. However, in his book Deep Hot Biosphere, renownedscientist Thomas Gold makes a case for the “abiogenic” formation of oil and gas, believing they upwell from the Earth’s core (hydrocarbon vents in the deep ocean are one example of this phenomenon). Gold points out that we’ve detected hydrocarbons like propane and methane (the primary component of natural gas) on other objects in our solar system, including Uranus, Neptune, and Mars. In fact, Saturn’s moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons on its surface than all the known oil reserves on Earth.
Consider this: in a 1977 speech by American President Jimmy Carter, he warned that “the oil and natural gas we rely on for 75% of our energy are running out.” Back then, so-called experts estimated this “running out” date, when oil would be totally depleted, to be in the late 1980s or early 1990s. However, since then, our estimates of the world’s total oil supply has tripled—and it continues to grow each year. We’ve even found that many oil fields are refilling naturally…
Even though replete evidence exists for this “abiogenic” explanation of oil and gas formation, curiously little research is devoted to it today, apart from a cadre of dedicated scientists at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Perhaps this apathy is purely innocent. Or perhaps there is a sinister motive behind it.
A purely “biogenic” theory of “fossil fuels” equals a scarcity mindset: there is only a limited amount of biological material, so there is only a limited amount of oil. Increasing public awareness that at least some “fossil fuels” have a non-biological origin and upwell from the planet’s core would plunge energy prices and radically reshape the way we perceive Earth’s resources. Therefore, there exists motivation for energy corporations—some of the largest and most powerful multinationals on Earth—to both choke the development of electric vehicles and sponsor sustained propaganda campaigns to convince people that oil and gas are constantly on the verge of running out.
Knowingly manipulating public perception of oil’s availability while simultaneously limiting access to it, to the point of encouraging countries to fight entire wars over it? Now that’s diabolical.
Further reading: Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold
FALSE: Global Warming Is Destroying the Earth
Please don’t confuse our argument with the fact that global warming is happening, or the idea that recent global warming is caused primarily by human activity. We agree with those points.
Instead, we are arguing against a very common belief today: that global warming per se is destroying the world. Nowadays, many young people believe that it’s pointless to have children or invest into their futures because of global warming. In the case of the “Just Stop Oil” movement, children are groomed into believing that environmentalism means throwing vandalizing Van Gogh paintings or shutting down highways.
These are powerful mind viruses we are fighting here. We first need to recognize that we can be both ardent environmentalists and global warming optimists. Global warming does not equal the destruction of the Earth. In fact, over the last 30 years, you could argue that global warming has been good for the Earth.
NASA admits that since 1985, rising CO2 levels associated with global warming have significantly greened up to 50% of the Earth’s vegetated lands. Should global warming continue up to 1-2° Celsius, millions of square miles of the most fertile, untilled land in human history will thaw in Russia and Canada. As a result, worldwide food production is estimated to increase. Because of global warming, the Sahara has growing freshwater lakes for the first time in thousands of years, gifting millions of people with access to water.
Of course there, there are negative effects of global warming, such as increased instability in some weather systems. However, we need to recognize that the apocalyptic global warming predictions many of us grew up with— such as 75% of the Arctic ice cap disappearing by 2016 or sea levels rising 20 feet by now—never came true, and are still not anywhere close to coming true.
This is not to argue that humanity should intentionally increase the temperature of the Earth—it’s obvious that at one point, too much warming would be a bad thing. However, some of the solutions proposed by politicians are ludicrous, such as freezing our economies so that we can shift Earth’s temperature by a tenth of a degree. Instead, we should focus our energy on causes like: bringing people out of poverty, nurturing biodiversity, ridding the ocean of microplastics, cleaning our air, reforestation (which also helps address global warming), and teaching our children that hating humanity isn’t the same as loving nature.
Did you notice a common denominator between this one and false belief #2? Both produce large amounts of fear in our society: fear, as history shows, is easily converted into control by governments.
Further reading: “The Bright Side of Global Warming” (Countere Magazine)
FALSE: Ghosts Aren’t Real
Over the last 400 years, we’ve attempted to stamp out every supernatural belief in our society. Nietzsche declared “God is dead” in 1882, and the gradual stripping away of non-“rational” beliefs has continued to this day.
Most people declare ghosts aren’t real because they believe they can’t be replicated using the scientific method. The scientific method, while still the best way to determine a causal relationship, is not adequate for understanding the entirety of our world. For example, a being more advanced than us, that wished to evade detection, would find ways to easily circumvent so-called “duplicability.” By their nature, supernatural phenomena are one-off phenomena, and impossible to recreate in a laboratory.
The fact that the scientific method can’t capture supernatural phenomena does not count as proof against the existence of supernatural phenomena. In fact, if there was a jury trial on this matter, you could make a case that ghosts exist beyond a reasonable doubt. The odds are likely that you or someone you know has had a paranormal experience. Once again, author Tao Lin is at the top of his game here, publishing in 2025 a list of 40 documented paranormal phenomena from various contemporary writers.
There are many theories for ghosts: they could be souls lost in Purgatory, fourth-dimensional beings, glitches in the simulation, clouds of energy, or byproducts of the “Stone Tape Theory”—how strong negative emotions get soaked up by the materials nearby, such as stones, chairs, and trees, and then get released later and played back like recordings. They could be demons, tulpas, skinwalkers, poltergeists, or angels. The bottom line is that whatever we call “ghosts,” there is a overwhelming evidence that they exist—and this forces us to conclude there is another unseen, unknown layer to our reality. Most likely, many more.
Further reading: “Busting Ghosts With West Virginia’s Paranormal Investigators” (Countere Magazine)
FALSE: Life Doesn’t Exist on Mars
Just trust us on this one, let’s say we have a little bit of insider knowledge. Mars is teeming with life under its surface. In fact, most life in the universe is under the surface.
Thank us in a few years for this one.
