London. 1894. Tens of thousands of horses, each producing up to thirty pounds of manure daily. New York. A hundred thousand horses. Even more manure. Other large cities were similar. Dung filled the streets and gutters. Equine urine was released everywhere. The streets stank. Flies bred by the billions. On sunny days, dust choked pedestrians and drivers. On rainy days, the streets became a slippery, slimy, disease-carrying muck that oozed into sewers and polluted nearby waterways. The smell was overwhelming, and health hazards abounded.
As cities grew denser and more dependent on horses for transport and commerce, the problem intensified. Entrepreneurs did their best, collecting the manure and selling it as valuable fertilizer to nearby farms, but the sheer volume was overwhelming. Giant piles accumulated in vacant lots. Disposal became expensive and logistically nightmarish. The crisis felt mathematically inevitable: The great cities of the world were being buried in poop.
Planners and commentators warned of impending collapse. The oft-repeated story claims that in 1894, The Times of London predicted streets would be buried under nine feet of manure by the 1940s, and that the 1898 international urban planning conference in New York dissolved in despair. Those dramatic details appear to be later embellishments or urban legends. But the underlying problem was very real: abundant, smelly, unhealthy manure that no amount of shoveling could fully solve.
Then came the pivot. Over roughly two to three decades, the internal combustion engine, affordable automobiles (Henry Ford’s Model T and its rivals), electric trams, and motorized trucks rendered urban horses largely obsolete, and the manure problem vanished. The transformation wasn’t instantaneous, but it was marvelously fast for such a massive shift in infrastructure, economics, and daily life. The manure crisis didn’t end because we got better at managing manure. Instead, we simply made the entire horse-based transportation system unnecessary.
The Flip
This is a classic example of what I call a Flip — a moment when a trajectory that looks locked-in and catastrophic suddenly pivots because human ingenuity finds an unforeseen exit ramp.
It is also what real-life eucatastrophe looks like. J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe” for a sudden joyous turn in a story, the blessed pivot that arrives precisely when defeat seems certain. In fiction, it often feels like grace. In history, it arrives through markets, tinkerers, entrepreneurs, and, critically, adaptive systems that let people experiment their way out of trouble.
History is full of these Flips. Again and again, experts and models have projected straight-line doom, only for human adaptability to rewrite the ending.
Consider the mid-19th-century whale-oil crisis. Whales were being hunted to near extinction to light lamps and lubricate machinery. Experts warned that dwindling supplies would plunge the world into darkness and economic stagnation. The solution was petroleum. The refining of kerosene, patented in 1855, created a cheaper, more abundant light source, while the discovery of abundant oil reserves starting in 1859 cemented its place in the market. Oil saved the whales.
Then came the Malthusian trap. For over a century, scholars warned that population growth would inevitably outrun food production, leading to famine and societal collapse. Yet the Green Revolution, synthetic fertilizers (the Haber-Bosch process), high-yield crops, global trade, and, more recently, declining fertility rates broke the cycle. Billions were fed, and the most dire predictions never materialized. Instead, people are rising out of poverty with remarkable speed, and hunger is dwindling quickly as an issue.
In the 1970s and 1980s, we faced the acid rain scare: forests dying across North America and Europe, lakes becoming sterile. A few years later came the ozone hole panic, with predictions of massive cancer spikes and ecosystem collapse. Both problems were real. Both were solved expeditiously through targeted regulations, technological innovation (scrubbers on smokestacks, safe substitutes for CFCs), and industry adaptation. The forests recovered and became even greener. The ozone layer is healing.
Time after time, the pattern repeats: A problem appears mathematically or environmentally inevitable. Straight-line extrapolation says collapse is coming. Then entrepreneurs, engineers, and market signals create an unexpected way out.
The Current Flip: Climate and Nuclear
The wider climate change narrative, with its warnings of runaway warming, inevitable extreme weather, resource wars, and civilizational strain under current trajectories, fits the same pattern. Many models and policy baselines have long assumed sloth-slow nuclear growth, persistent fossil dependence in key sectors, and ever-rising emissions as electricity and energy demand increase. The future, according to straight-line projections, looked locked in and grim.
Enter, surprisingly, the explosive growth of AI data centers. These facilities need reliable, 24/7 carbon-free power on a massive scale. Tech companies aren’t waiting for perfect policy solutions. They are signing direct contracts for small modular reactors (SMRs) and restarting old, retired nuclear plants. Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have already committed to multiple gigawatts of new nuclear capacity through deals with companies like Oklo, TerraPower, and existing operators. Market demand is accelerating deployment faster than older IPCC or IEA baselines assumed. Once again, real-world pressure and innovators responding to it are bending the “inevitable” trajectory.
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Why Flips Happen and What Can Stop Them
So why do these Flips keep happening?
They aren’t random miracles or lucky accidents. Two powerful forces are usually at work.
First, human adaptability. We are tool-making problem solvers. When pressure builds, whether from literal horse manure, whale scarcity, or surging electricity demand, we don’t just endure the problem. We reroute around it. Static models and straight-line forecasts, the simplistic models preferred by researchers, almost always underestimate this dynamic response.
Second, and more crucially, the freedom to let creators operate. Real Flips are usually driven by what Ayn Rand called the “prime movers” — the engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and capital allocators who see a problem, imagine a better way, risk their own resources, and scale solutions when they work. Free societies that protect property rights, allow experimentation, and reward success give these innovators room to breathe.
The danger is clear: Systems that suppress or punish creators, such as heavy central planning, burdensome regulation that blocks experimentation, or ideologies that demonize individual achievement, choke off future Flips. History shows that communist and heavily collectivized economies produced far fewer technological breakthroughs precisely because the prime movers either fled, went underground, or never emerged.
The streets of 1890s London and New York did not end up buried under nine feet of horse manure. The crisis was real, messy, and smelly, yet it was solved not by perfect manure management but by a better system that made the old one obsolete. That is the recurring miracle of the Flip.
History keeps showing us the same lesson: The trajectories that look most locked-in and catastrophic are often the ones most vulnerable to sudden, creative destruction. The real question is not whether the next crisis is coming. Crises will always come. The real question is whether we will continue to protect the cultural, economic, and legal soil in which these blessed turns can take root.
So the next time you hear that some disaster is mathematically inevitable — whether climate, energy, demographics, or anything else — remember the horses. Remember the manure. And keep the road open for the people who refuse to accept the trajectory as written.
The blessed turn is rarely predicted. But it keeps arriving anyway, as long as we let it.
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