Aestu wrote:
Yuratuhl wrote:
You mean like machine guns vs 19th century tactics?
No one foresaw that substances which were thought to be innocuous such as antimony or thalidomide or DDT or MBTE would prove much more dangerous than what they replaced.Banning DDT did more to harm people in third world countries than it did to save the environment...especially since the book, Silent Spring, exaggerated the claims of damage. While banning DDT in industrialized countries was likely a necessary step, banning it in Africa was a boneheaded move that allowed the unchecked spread of malaria and other diseases spread by insect pests like mosquitoes.
The dangers of MBTE were also exaggerated, especially by agricultural interests pushing to replace it with ethanol, a move that has not only increased the price of fuels, but also impacted the price of foods, especially those that were staples in economically depressed Central American countries, because it is manufactured by said agricultural concerns with crops usually used for food, as opposed to using other plants like scrub grasses.
In other words, the solutions to problems in a lot of cases cause problems themselves, though not necessarily worse problems than the ones they solved.
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No one foresaw that heroin and methamphetamine would prove even more addictive and destructive than the addictions they were developed to cure.
Heroin and meth weren't developed to treat addictions. Heroin is a derivative of opium that was used as a painkiller, though it did replace morphine in cough medicines because it was supposed to be less addictive. Among the long list of ailments meth was supposed to treat, the only thing related to addiction was alcoholism, and I doubt anyone saw meth as being an alcohol "substitute." This is aside from the fact that it is commonly accepted that addictions can only be treated, not, as you say, "cured."
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No one foresaw that making everything out of plastic would cause problems because it's not biodegradable.
Everything degrades, even if it doesn't "bio"degrade. It just takes some things longer than others. Plastic is still superior to glass because it doesn't break and cut the hell out of your children. Not to mention that methods to recycle both glass and plastic have been developed that reduce the amount of both kinds of waste.
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No one foresaw that building dams and redirecting water supplies would cause severe water shortages and dry lakes.
Yeah, they did, but they did it anyway and claim ignorance.
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No one foresaw that industrialized fishing would prove that, in fact, there is not always another fish in the sea.
As certain types of fish become more scarce, the price for them goes up. As the price goes up, more people are priced out of eating it. At a certain point, fishing it becomes unprofitable. Other types of fish take the place of the overfished populations, and the damaged populations have an opportunity to recover.
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No one foresaw how dangerous radiation would prove to be - and so now we spend many times the revenue from early experiments on cleaning them up.
I doubt anyone foresaw the devastation fire could cause, either, but we worked that out, and seem to be doing pretty well with it.
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No one foresaw the ways in which various changes to society driven by technology and liberalism would threaten the viability of human society in the very long term.
Funny, but technology continues to make things better as far as I can tell. Then again, I'm one of those nuts that thinks smog is better than having to have horseshit scraped off the street eight times a day while the town smells like shit. As for no one foreseeing the dangers of liberalism, I'm pretty sure that there have been more than a few "lol@foxnews" posts done by our contributors to disprove that idea.
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No one foresaw that late motherhood and assisted pregnancy would cause a rise in marginally viable children.
I'm pretty sure the dangers of older women having children was well documented even before women started putting off having kids until they were wrinkled prunes, since it was not uncommon for women to just continually squeeze the things out to keep up a steady stream of farm-hands.
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We should learn to be cautious. Not go back to living in huts - but be cautious.
Just looking at the kind of shit that has to be done before a new drug can be tested on people, much less before it can be approved to treat anything, which is exemplary of our modern "cautiousness," I'd say we've got caution down. What we need to do is figure out how to get callow media-saturated half-wits to stop going into apoplectic fight-or-flight responses every time Brian Williams does an "
OH SHIT, THIS COULD BE THE APOCALYPSE, SOMEONE FOUND .000000074% LEAD IN A TOY" story.
Your Pal,
Jubber
