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Nanotech Protests Begin
ByteWoopy wrote to mention a Wire.com story discussing the danger of nanotechnology, and the beginning of a backlash against the branch of technology. From the article: "...environmental activists sauntered into the Eddie Bauer store on Michigan Avenue, headed to the broad storefront windows opening out on the Magnificent Mile and proceeded to take off their clothes. The strip show aimed to expose more than skin: Activists hoped to lay bare growing allegations of the toxic dangers of nanotechnology. The demonstrators bore the message in slogans painted on their bodies, proclaiming 'Eddie Bauer hazard' and 'Expose the truth about nanotech,' among other things, in light of the clothing company's embrace of nanotech in its recent line of stain-resistant nanopants."
Yeah, and people weren't scared of wall paneling either, when it contained asbestos.
--LWM
Merits and dangers of technology aside, activists seem more and more stupid these days. Yeah, shock value gets you *attention* -- but not credibility. MLK had protestors dress up in their sunday best, looking dignified. If they'd run through the streets nude and shouting, it would have been a fine spectacle, but we'd probably still have seperate water fountains.
So yeah. Fight the man. Spark debate over nanotech, GM food, war, whatever. Just do it with some sense, OK? Protest is already in danger of becoming dead as a vector for social change. Turning it into an easy parody of itself isn't helping.
Tweet, tweet.
There's really very little difference between radical environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.
Both want to control what everyone else does and thinks based on their own unreasonable and unprovable beliefs. "The end of the world is nigh" indeed.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
I hope I'm not the only one who sees something wrong with a person who believes that a cable channel's website is reason enough to hate me.
First off, let me preface this by saying that I'm a huge nanotech fan. The sort of leap-forward potential that nanotech provides in superconductors, photovoltaics, betavoltaics, computing, LEDs, medical tracers, antibiotics, genetics, materials, rocketry, and just about everything that you can think of are of such a huge scale, it's hard to even picture.
However, it would be wrong of us to pretend that there aren't serious risks. And, no, I'm not talking about dumb "grey goo" scenarios. Look at CNTs, for example. Very stable, aerosolizable in some situations, and very easily penetrates cells. Add various functional groups onto them (like many projects are doing) that might damage cell internals, and it sounds like a ready-made health nightmare. The problem with many nanoparticles is that they're very small, and thus able to get to places that their non-soluable relatives couldn't. They often tend to be either very stable or very reactive in comparison to their large-scale relatives.
Oh, and before all of the poorly thought out "nanoparticles like CNTs occur in nature in candle soot!", that's like arguing that since cyanide occurs in many fruits, we shouldn't worry about pure cyanide.
We shouldn't hold up research; far from it, the varying fields of nanotech really look to be the next leap forward in almost every scientific arena. But we also need to put them under great scrutiny, or we'll have another DDT on our hands.
Sigur RÃs: I didn't know that Heaven had a rock band.
While I do think that protesting is a valuable tool, I think there are too many people who get into it without sufficient knowledge and then refuse outright to change their positions. It becomes more about winning and less about wanting to do some good.
Let me give you a quick example. At my university, there was a large number of people protesting against coke (the cola). Boiled down to the basics, and skipping some important details, basically, they argued we shouldn't drink coke becuase of their business practices in columbia...they were endagering and/or killing (depending on who you talk to) workers and being anti-union. Since I'm an avid coke drinker, the possibility of loss of coke disturbed me, but I felt I should learn a bit about it. I went to talk to one of the protesters and ask some questions. One of my questins was along the lines of "do you know that the columbian government investigated this and found coke not guilty? Do you also know that they have the highest union rates in the country even though you're accusing them of being anti-union?" Her response was that the columbian gov't couldn't be trusted, and coke should still have more union workers even though they have the most per capita already. I forgot about the union thing and asked who would be able to provide objective evidence to convince her that coke was innocent. The columbian gov't couldn't, so who could? Her reply? No one. No one could ever convince her. So I asked if she really though that her opinion was more informed than every legal body in the world, despite the fact that she didn't have access to the facts presented to the courts. She told me engineering students were morons who should keep out of social issues.
I don't have an opinion on the coke issue really. I don't know for sure what happened down there, but I continue to drink coke. Maybe I'm a bad person, who knows. But the point is that both sides of these types of arguments need to step back and evaluate the merits of the other side, and determine what level of confidence they have in their positions, what evidence they have backing them, and what type of evidence would convince them not necessarily to change their mind, but to at least re-evaulate their positions. In the case of a protest against something, this is hard since it's impossible to prove conclusively that something is safe, but at some point the benefits outweigh the risks. At the point where you are saying that no amount of reasonable evidence contrary to your position will cause you to change your mind, this should serve as a realization that you are being irrational. And while everyone has their irrational issues, it's not these people who should be leading and articulating the views of their side of the argument, since a that point it is not fact being argued, but irrational opinion. It's a pipe dream that this will actually happen, I know, and I'm far from innocent on this matter, but it's something to consider.
...no two people are not on fire.