So people kind of knew asbestos was harmful wayyy before it mostly stopped being used in 1979 (USA). But, it was still used constantly in many industries and ended up everywhere. What do you think is an example of something we find out is DRASTICALLY harmful 10-50 years from now? My guess would be screen time.
LLMs.
I’m sure the “AI” companies have plenty of studies proving they cause addiction, brain damage (probably irreversible), and psychosis, but they’re keeping them to themselves, much like cigarette cartels did with studies proving their shit caused cancer.
PFAS
Microplastics is the obvious one. High fructose corn syrup. Palm oil is used in so many things (even juices and biscuits/cookies). Billionaires. Politicians.
Cars. I hope vroomers rots in hell
Oil extracted from the ground. That takes the trophy for the whole century.
Crude oil and fossil fuel?
They harm the environment.Well, they literally tried to (partially) deregulate asbestos, as fucking obviously asinine and corrupt of a move as that would be, so…asbestos might end up being your answer. How fucked is that?
Got to say the obvious: sugar.
Industry sugar is just very bad for us for multiple reasons but it’s used everywhere because of addictive properties.
Go research the sugar cartel and the sugar Vs fat thing which brought the US to fat free stuff which massively raised obesity.
Micro plastics
To be fair, asbestos is still all over the place. They did this fun thing where they just reclassified different asbestos structures into different categories and banned some of them.
My guess for another substance that isn’t asbestos will be either PFAS or we’ll finally find out what all these micro/nanoplastics are doing to us.
Honestly? Oil usage. Everyone knows it’s bad, and the only people really in a position to do anything about have a vested interest in leaving things as is.
This sounds exactly like Asbestos.
What oil?
You mean fossil fuelfuel or like sunflower and olive?
The one that’s choking the world economy because total output went down 20%
In terms of materials, plastic food packaging maybe?
Yeah microplastics seem creepy
High THC cannabis vapes.
Why do you think so? Obviously lungs are ONLY for air, but why high thc specifically?
Mostly feeling the vibes given the recent Australian report linking nicotine vapes to cancer and the anecdotal evidence I have for these strong vapes causing all sorts of negative mental outcomes or dependency for people I know who use them heavily. We still have a lot of space to learn about unintended consequences here and I’m pessimistic.
Fuck, I hope not.
Hottest take and speculative: Covid.
And it kind of depends on how you think about the scale of impacts. Aspestos is horribly damaging for a few people directly exposed. The rate of exposure to covid is orders of magnitude higher.
I think we’ve really only begun to see the long term impacts, and we know already of many of the long term issues related to decline in cognitive abilities, heart issues, all kinds of other stuff. But we right now, only know the small “near tail” behavior of those issues. It will take decades to find the “long tail” behavior of the disease.
So if asbestos exposure is 100x as damaging as covid exposure, say… but 10,000x as many are exposed to covid… its overall impact is 100x that of asbestos.
Very interesting what long term effects many aspects of that situation will be.
Yeah. I mean, I think we’ll see a global drop in total average intelligence equivalent to wide-scale exposure to an environmental toxin like lead.
Asbestos is bad.
But how do you quantify the impacts of a global average decline in IQ of 1-2%?
I really think it’s artificial sweeteners but I also think they just taste horrible.
