I was actually thinking about this exact topic a few days ago, holding up a phone in hotspot mode to my ear and thinking facetiously "this is gonna kill me someday", but then realizing that there have been many other things in history that were once thought not to be harmful, and only hindsight tells us otherwise.
I then imagined the reactions our societies would have if EM spectrum exposure was suddenly found to be harmful; a vast backlash against wireless devices would follow, communications infrastructure would be litigated against, and there would be a faction of holdouts who just don't care and will continue to do what they want, like it happens with tobacco and other substances widely recognized to be harmful.
In the case of asbestos, it was known in Ancient Greece that those mining or processing asbestos sometimes sickened in ways that the general populace did not [1]. Yet its utility helped it achieve lasting relevance, where by the 19th century it was no longer a curiosity but an important industrial ingredient.
Therefore, I'd say that asbestos is probably a bad example, because its harmful effects in high doses were observed early on, we as societies just didn't find it expedient to combat against it until alternatives were beginning to be available (or we treated miners and workers as more than just expendable). Conversely, I think hydrofluorocarbons are a better example, as it took time for their harmful effects to be observable and in the beginning they were looking miraculously inert and harmless. I don't believe anyone could've known ahead of time that HFCs would cause the environmental damage in the upper atmosphere they ultimately were discovered to have done.
I'd argue that asbestos is a great example, because it shows that in reality it's not the unknowns that harm us, but willfully ignoring the knowns. It's like smoking--the harms were known for a long time. Smoking was considered unhealthy even in the 19th century. Rather, it was the culture that chose to ignore and discount the evidence.
What's different about EM exposure is that it has been heavily studied, yet from theory to experiment there's scant evidence of significant harms. Certainly not at the scale of asbestos, smoking, or other historic or current risks.
I think lesson is that most real risks are knowable and right in front of us. But the way fear works, we tend to think it's hiding around the corner, hidden. So we obsesses over EM emissions rather than regularly testing for lead in our houses or, as a community, our food supply.
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I was actually thinking about this exact topic a few days ago, holding up a phone in hotspot mode to my ear and thinking facetiously "this is gonna kill me someday", but then realizing that there have been many other things in history that were once thought not to be harmful, and only hindsight tells us otherwise.
I then imagined the reactions our societies would have if EM spectrum exposure was suddenly found to be harmful; a vast backlash against wireless devices would follow, communications infrastructure would be litigated against, and there would be a faction of holdouts who just don't care and will continue to do what they want, like it happens with tobacco and other substances widely recognized to be harmful.
In the case of asbestos, it was known in Ancient Greece that those mining or processing asbestos sometimes sickened in ways that the general populace did not [1]. Yet its utility helped it achieve lasting relevance, where by the 19th century it was no longer a curiosity but an important industrial ingredient.
Therefore, I'd say that asbestos is probably a bad example, because its harmful effects in high doses were observed early on, we as societies just didn't find it expedient to combat against it until alternatives were beginning to be available (or we treated miners and workers as more than just expendable). Conversely, I think hydrofluorocarbons are a better example, as it took time for their harmful effects to be observable and in the beginning they were looking miraculously inert and harmless. I don't believe anyone could've known ahead of time that HFCs would cause the environmental damage in the upper atmosphere they ultimately were discovered to have done.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canjclin.34.1.44/...
I'd argue that asbestos is a great example, because it shows that in reality it's not the unknowns that harm us, but willfully ignoring the knowns. It's like smoking--the harms were known for a long time. Smoking was considered unhealthy even in the 19th century. Rather, it was the culture that chose to ignore and discount the evidence.
What's different about EM exposure is that it has been heavily studied, yet from theory to experiment there's scant evidence of significant harms. Certainly not at the scale of asbestos, smoking, or other historic or current risks.
I think lesson is that most real risks are knowable and right in front of us. But the way fear works, we tend to think it's hiding around the corner, hidden. So we obsesses over EM emissions rather than regularly testing for lead in our houses or, as a community, our food supply.