A Nuclear Jockstrap
carlwillis.wordpress.com
carlwillis.wordpress.com
In other words - do we do something today which will seem as hare-brained to our descendants as irradiating one's genitals does to us? (We probably do - but what will it be...)
Barbarism is bad behaviour when the better alternative is already known.
We need to be careful when we judge the past to judge it on the facts known at the time.
So, I agree that they will look barbaric once a pill free of side effects can cure cancer but it will only look barbaric, not have been barbaric.
Something that is genuinely homoeopathic doesn't contain any of the poisons either. Or at least at such a low concentration that it is insignificant.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions):
Hahnemann advocated 30C dilutions for most purposes (that is, dilution by a factor of 1060).
...
Dilution advocated by Hahnemann for most purposes: on average, this would require giving two billion doses per second to six billion people for 4 billion years to deliver a single molecule of the original material to any patient.
The idea that circumcision has substantive positive health effects has been thoroughly debunked in the presence of semi-regular washing, and the jury is out in third-world countries without sanitation. However, when you factor in the risk of infant mortality from infection or botched procedure in those same third-world countries, any (minor) health benefit that might exist disappears and goes negative.
Hygiene also doesn't seem to be an accepted excuse for clitoral hood removal, even though it's anatomically identical (mutatis mutandis) to male circumcision and presumably has similar (minor) health benefits (dryer environments are harsher on bacteria).
The one non-negligible semi-legitimate medical justification is in the case of severe phimosis, but that can almost always be treated with topical creams rather than surgery and doesn't manifest until adolescence anyway, so it's not an excuse to circumcise babies.
Though, I'm surprised there isn't a small movement of "home pharmacologists" who buy herbs (or supplement pills/powders) and then distill/reflux/recrystallize out the active ingredients and re-portion them into dosing media for their own use.
Human beings driving cars. The activity that for years maimed and killed millions of people, but we did it anyway while worrying about terrorist attacks.
I would suspect that at some point the notion of carrying a firearm is going to be pretty laughable, given what they'll be capable of then.
Human doctors and the current standard of medical errors and deaths due to lack of cleanliness... which is a lot of death and suffering by the way. We do it now, like driving, because we have no choice, but as soon as we do humans doctors will look like barbers.
So so much more. It takes time to start to see your own time from a future point of view, but once you start you can't stop. Then again, an alternative and perhaps more realistic view is that in a hundred years civilization will be collapsing, and these will be the last "good" days. Who knows?
Humans are healthier than ever. While nutrition will probably improve in the future, it's actually quite good right now.
> Human beings driving cars. The activity that for years maimed and killed millions of people, but we did it anyway while worrying about terrorist attacks.
That's because the utility of car usage is undeniably positive. Despite millions of deaths over the decades, humanity would be a lot worse off without cars to get around and transport goods.
If you just mean humans as opposed to computers, then you're probably right. I do think it would be a net negative to society if humans were forced to stop driving, however. That would just be one more way to dull the human experience and go from living to surviving.
> the notion of carrying a firearm is going to be pretty laughable, given what they'll be capable of then
Do you mean to say that they'll be too powerful in the future? I'm not sure I understand the argument; presumably, there'll be some sort of limitation on what kind of weapons people are allowed to use. The restrictions are usually pretty silly and arbitrary right now (e.g. "no barrel shroud"), but I could imagine a future where there are laws like "no carrying around a weapon capable of putting out more than 10kW averaged over a minute".
Probably
>While nutrition will probably improve in the future, it's actually quite good right now.
If we get rid of fast food and excessive sugar and salt, there will be a vast improvement regardless of how much better 2017 is compared to earlier times. Therefore they would still shake their heads at 2017 food in the future.
Hell even dentures had uranium in them until relatively recently, for a 'more natural glow', don't you know. Homeopathy is kooky, but that doesn't stop more people from using it now than were alive just a few hundred years ago. It's kooky, but it's also very popular.