It might be they will be like "shame they didn't have this awesome new material that has 0 environmental/health impact that we have today" though.
There are no clear substitutes for plastic in a lot of applications even when you disregard price.
The future is not known. Let's see. We obviously didn't all die of food poisoning before the invention of plastic.
If you watched their actual choices, when confronted with shiny transparent-and-or-colorful familiar plastic vs. paper replacements...yeah.
(And as soon as you have paper packaging, the big companies want to "improve" it with 57 varieties of chemicals & coatings & treatments & crap. Not to say that manufacturing paper is anything resembling clean & green, either.)
One can make even grander claims about having plumbing vs. the effects of lead poisoning.
Like, clearly plastics are bad. And yet, humans like the convenience, the utility.
Asbestos too, though that's less threatening as long as it's not being actively fucked with.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/health/2024-11-19/thousands-of-mas...
Microplastic risk is not anywhere close to lead, we should not even be discussing these two things in the same paragraph.
Lead is bad because it mimics calcium and iron in our body, binding to proteins, sneaking into bones, causes anemia, disrupts brain function...
Plastic is inert, it is made of long chains of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These long chains do not break down easily. Microplastic, while it does not pass through the body, and can accumulate in organs, its impact is still under study. We aren't ingesting high doses.
BUT, bad pipes may leach other stuff. Some additives in certain plastics seem to mimic hormones and potentially disrupt them. Some additives are carcinogenic. (but only in high doses I guess). Certified modern pipes are safer.
Yeah, though I’m much more concerned about those that are not so obviously bad, that we still don’t know how terrible they are. You know, the unknown unknows.
I can drink water from a lead pipe all day and suffer not even a headache.
EDIT I'm serious. What is the obvious manifestation? Because the manifestations I've heard of aren't so obvious.
I'd say they did things that were harmful that they did not know they were harmful. Unless they did it in the face of clear evidence of the harm, what is there to mock?
I expect the people in 100 years from now will laugh at us for doing all of the things that we absolutely know are harming the environment right now. Perhaps they will even laugh at us for hand wringing about plastics on the possibility that they might be harmful while doing next to nothing about the things we do actually have evidence for,
I have to add that I hear this premise expressed quite often from people peddling low-evidence medical advice and not-quite-believable conspiracy, who try to give credence to their theory by pointing out that the people-you-don't-like disagree with them, no matter what the grounds of disagreement actually are. (I've seen people refer to this thought pattern as the "Galileo fallacy", although we also shouldn't let these named fallacies turn us away from actual interesting ideas just because the public disagrees, too. It's a balance.)
I usually hear what you've expressed from people who are glad that other people were censored: a vague argument for the existence of the possibility of censorship that isn't meant as political suppression, one which usually relies on accusing any possibly censored hypothetical person of likely being crazy, stupid, or a foreign spy.
Rather than an argument, it's an encouragement to use those priors when calculating the odds of the next "conspiracy theory" being censored off the internet actually being true. Remember, arrested people are usually guilty, because most of the guilty people I know about were arrested...
It is often the case that something with desired good effects also has undesirable bad side effects, but the good effects and their value outweigh the bad effects.
I don't know if the Romans made tradeoffs like this; they were well aware of its chronic toxicity which resulted in plumbism. But you have to remember that we're talking about a diverse ancient empire. People today know that stuffing your face with garbage food and in large amounts is bad for you, and the speed of communication and scope of regulation are might higher, but the "practice" is widespread anyway.
Assuming archives are up, hello from the past! :wave:
We wont do a damn thing about the dangers of micro plastic now until it gets incredibly bad that we cant ignore it.
Id say they would actually laugh at us for that though in the future
I'll concede that they are everywhere, and they are detectable. What is the established consensus on the harm that they cause?
Jump-off points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics_and_human_health...
The BPA wikipedia article says the primary source of human exposure is from canned food. That seems like it could be solved with a specific fix. It is not stated, but I would assume that the exposure from particles distributed in the environment would be insignificant if there is a known primary source that humans frequently interact with.