What technological advance has caused more harm than good?

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

This is going to be an earth shattering revelation but television holds the potential for such great good . . .

Not to disagree Al, but that arguement could be used against almost all technological improvements in communications. Gutenberg's printing press made information (beneficial or harmful) more easily distributed; radio signals have been used for saving lives during disasters and also as triggering mechanisms for weapons; the internet provides an encyclopedic database of knowledge, but also provides a means for whackos like Heaven's Gate to recruit and influence others.

Technology has always been a double-edged sword.

[KenWittlief]

This is interesting.

First thing that comes to my mind is gunpowder. It was used almost exclusively for weapons - cannons, and later firearms, that caused previously unheard of carnage on the battlefield

and leading to the carpet bombing of WW2 in which millions of people were killed by bombers who were so far away they could not even see the people they were killing

60 million dead in WW2 alone, almost all from gunpowder based weapons

by compairson, less than 200,000 people have died to date from nuclear weapons.

[Max Lobovsky]

That is a very interesting answer. I must have taken it for granted that there were no inventions used almost purely for harm. I wonder if gunpowder really did increase the death rate. Does anyone have any statistics on percentages of populations that died in pre-gunpowder wars? I know that something like 10% of the populations of Germany and Russia were killed during World War II.

[Travis Hoffman]

MTV. I just killed 20 brain cells by saying "MTV". Oops, there's another 20. I better quit while I'm ahead.

Oh yeah, and the microwave oven.

[Stephen Kowski]

PSP....I am supposed to studying and this thing is too distracting....ahhh d$%^ you sony...

[Mike]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

by compairson, less than 200,000 people have died to date from nuclear weapons.

200,000 in the initial impact maybe, but what about all those that got cancer from the radiation? Or what about the people who had to evacuate their homes because it was no longer habitable.

Imagine if terrorist's set a nuclear bomb off in New York City. With one bomb, millions of people would be killed, hundreds of thousands would later die due to cancer, thousands of square miles of land would be uninhabitable for centuries, and the whole world's economy would be in threat.

Time for a new thread...

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by MikeWasHere05

200,000 in the initial impact maybe, but what about all those that got cancer from the radiation?

The number of deaths among the survivors attributed to radiation-induced cancer is less than 500. No genetic effects (i.e. mutations in offspring) have yet been seen, but animal studies suggest that they typically don't appear until several generations after the initial exposure, so the jury is still out on that count.

Imagine if terrorist's set a nuclear bomb off in New York City. With one bomb, millions of people would be killed, hundreds of thousands would later die due to cancer, thousands of square miles of land would be inhabitable for centuries, and the whole world's economy would be in threat.

A single bomb capable of killing that many in one stroke would be unreasonably large. The cancer risk is definitely there, but highly overblown. I'd accept a major disruption to the global economy.

But "[un]inhabitable for centuries"? No way. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are obvious indications to the contrary.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by MikeWasHere05

Imagine if terrorist's set a nuclear bomb off in New York City. With one bomb, millions of people would be killed, hundreds of thousands would later die due to cancer, thousands of square miles of land would be inhabitable for centuries, and the whole world's economy would be in threat.

That's quite an overstatement, unless they managed to find themselves the plans for a high-end hydrogen bomb the size of a bus, and figured out how to put it together and set it off.

Take Hiroshima—one 13 kiloton bomb killed a little less than a hundred thousand instantly, and maybe sixty thousand more afterward due to radiation effects (and that's mostly acute effects—like radiation burns, rather than cancer). The city's population just prior to the nuclear bombing was around 250 000; now, it's over 2.8 million. It is not uninhabitable, and hasn't ever been so, except, broadly speaking, the short period while the contaminated debris was being removed. In fact, for the sort of long-term effects you describe, only something like a very large cobalt bomb would suffice, because of the long half-life of the isotopes of that element. (Those have never been tried, because they're potentially so messy—the terrorists would have to develop it on their own, rather than merely steal one!)

Now, setting off a 13 kiloton bomb is no mean feat. But enough destruction to instantly kill millions of people would probably require something on the order of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, which had a test yield of 50 000 kilotons, and a theoretical yield of 100 000 kilotons. It's said that the 50 megaton explosion would have had a lethal radius of over 100 km, which would certainly accomplish that. In any case, to incinerate millions, you'd need several tens of thousands of kilotons, at least. Once again, those sorts of experimental bombs aren't just lying around for the stealing, even in Russia.

As for whether a terrorist group could manage to make such a device (like the 1940s-era Little Boy, to say nothing of the 1960s-era Tsar Bomba), they would need access to some very specialized equipment (it's not COTS), some significant expertise, and hard-to-find materials like enriched uranium (i.e. with a high proportion of ²³⁵U).

Now, the sort of bombs you might actually have to worry about might include dirty bombs, or even the old-fashioned truckload of something explosive. There's not actually that much you can do to avoid these—short of searching every truck that enters NYC—but the consolation (after a fashion) is that it wouldn't kill nearly so many people. The real trouble is, 50 megatons by H-bomb, or one kiloton by NH₄NO₃-diesel-bomb; it doesn't matter, if it goes off in New York. The world's economy will indeed tremble, and in all likelihood, America will go on another foolish killing spree, if there's no way to strike at the actual responsible party. (But that's for the other thread that Mike spoke of....)

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

The number of deaths among the survivors attributed to radiation-induced cancer is less than 500. No genetic effects (i.e. mutations in offspring) have yet been seen, but animal studies suggest that they typically don't appear until several generations after the initial exposure, so the jury is still out on that count.

A single bomb capable of killing that many in one stroke would be unreasonably large. The cancer risk is definitely there, but highly overblown. I'd accept a major disruption to the global economy.

But "[un]inhabitable for centuries"? No way. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are obvious indications to the contrary.

Taken from http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2001/0...s/08060003.htm

Studies on 1600 children who were irradiated while they were in their mother's womb during the atomic bomb explosions in the two cities revealed that 30 of them suffered clinically severe mental retardation.
...
There was no detectable threshold dose below which the effect was zero.

From http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~copeland/atomicbomb.html

On the other hand, leukemia, a non-tumor type cancer, is remarkably different. An excess risk of leukemia was one of the earliest delayed effects of radiation exposure seen in the victims, and today, more than 50 years after the bombs, this excess is reflected as the most widely apparent long-term radiation effect

What I was trying to say with the cancer argument was that nuclear bombs cause very harmful medical problems, including cancer.

With the advancement of technology, i'm sure that soon a relatively small bomb will soon be able to have that amount of destructions.

And yes, it was uninhabitable...

EDIT: I'd just like to say I know nothing about the science of nuclear weapons, but rather i'm basing my "calculations" on what has happened in the past and the huge leap in technology that we've had in the past century.

[Alan Anderson]

First, I agree that nuclear explosives have indeed caused more harm than good. The "plowshares" program never went anywhere; radioactive natural gas was considered a showstopper and conventional explosives are more than sufficient for major earthmoving projects.

Now, to put the quotes from MikeWasHere05 into slightly more focused context:

Originally Posted by http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/2001/09/06/stories/08060003.htm

Studies on 1600 children who were irradiated while they were in their mother's womb during the atomic bomb explosions in the two cities revealed that 30 of them suffered clinically severe mental retardation.
...
There was no detectable threshold dose below which the effect was zero.

This is neither cancer nor genetic damage. This is merely disrupted development, very similar to fetal alcohol syndrome.

Originally Posted by http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~copeland/atomicbomb.html

On the other hand, leukemia, a non-tumor type cancer, is remarkably different. An excess risk of leukemia was one of the earliest delayed effects of radiation exposure seen in the victims, and today, more than 50 years after the bombs, this excess is reflected as the most widely apparent long-term radiation effect

This "excess" is fewer than 100 individuals. While statistically significant, it is also clearly not the magnitude of issue that some people think it is.

Originally Posted by MikeWasHere05

What I was trying to say with the cancer argument was that nuclear bombs cause very harmful medical problems, including cancer.

The statistics support you when you say nuclear bombs cause medical problems including cancer. However, they contradict you when you predict the number of deaths.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

The statistics support you when you say nuclear bombs cause medical problems including cancer. However, they contradict you when you predict the number of deaths.

Yeah I see that now, I never really researched this kind of stuff and threw a predicted number out there. Learned to not do that again

[KenWittlief]

On second thought, I gotta say the Xerox machine

thousands and thousands of Monks, out on the streets - out of a job, with no prospects!

"It says here on your resume you've been a scribe for 38 years
do you have any other job skills?"

"Is not speaking for a year a job skill? " :^)

[Andy A.]

PC solitaire.

-Andy A.

[Barry Bonzack]

hmm. What about this "wheel" invention. This just lead to man needing the desire to "accessorise" their new toy with "combustion engines" and "gyros" later on. We should all just be happy with what we have and stop trying to progress.

[Scott L.]

Every great technological advance has brought about both good and bad.

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"

J. Robert Oppenheimer after witnessing the Trinity test