That’a fair point and I might be overpanicking. I could argue that it might be happening and we just don’t know about it, but from what I gathered, yes strokes are on the rise, but experts seem to believe it’s related to blood pressure. Although there probably weren’t as much microplastics when the last generation was born ; it’s now ubiquitous to the point of being found in the blood of fetuses. If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t. All the while they’re lobbying billions of dollars to try and make the research as slow as possible so that they can get every last cent of profit before X gets banned.
myrmidon|1 year ago
I think this is still overly alarmist. Plastic production basically started really ramping up in the 1950s in industrialized nations-- thats 75 years ago.
Yes, you can argue that exposure might have increased significantly since (+ bioaccumulation etc.), but excess mortality should've been roughly proportional, and I'd argue that it's implausible for "plastic lethality" to stay hidden for so long (I fully agree that it's not pretty that the stuff is everywhere nowadays, but I think "next generation is all gonna die from this before they get 50" is just not reasonable to assume, and we arguably cause much bigger problems for the next generations already anyway).
> I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t.
I think this is a luxury problem-- you might be very willing to forego all remotely risky innovations/technologies now-- but you are rich compared to a person 75 years ago (and we reaped lots of benefits from that risk already!).
De-risking everything might look attractive in hindsight, but it is unclear what you would have lost to such a policy: Possibly a big chunk of modern material science, electronics, communication technology, ...
It is easy to downplay all that today, and pretend we never really wanted smartphones anyway, but I'm skeptical that the average person a hundred years ago would have seen this in the same way.