This is why I will never let my children read a car manual. What if they build a car and run someone over?
I used to share your perspective. Then I ended up with a [step]kid whose only interests in medicine and engineering keep me awake at night.
I think the best way of dealing with that sort of situation is to find them a mentor or role model that can show them how it's actually done and turn the interest into something that can be explored safely. I think if my friend had actually known real chemists that could mentor him and that he could talk to about his projects, there's a chance he might have been alive today.
There are things that have an element of danger, and then there are things that are reckless bordering on suicidal. Any real world chemist would probably just stare at you in disbelief if you told them you wanted to make TATP in your bedroom. That isn't just dangerous, it's moronic, beyond reckless.
This stuff is highly explosive and notoriously difficult to handle because of its volatility and propensity for spontaneous detonation. You don't know that if you're 15 and getting all your advice from the Internet, though. You may even hear a nickname like "mother of satan" and think it sounds pretty cool. Turns out chemists usually give substances nicknames like that for a reason.
I think what's the most dangerous is kids experimenting alone without any experience based advice from some dodgy internet forum.
Source: all of the chemicals I've purchased to blow up tree stumps and what-not that I'm sure have me on some watch list somewhere.
I think you have to go to specialty suppliers. https://luciteria.com/elements-for-sale/thallium-metal-9999
https://www.alfa.com/en/catalog/012131/ https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/277932
The idea of children having access to a credit card strikes me as dangerous and irresponsible for many more reasons than just the odd chance that they use it to buy chemicals online.
If you want to buy something as a child, you use cash or get a parent's permission.
(Preempting the "ok boomer" responses, I'm 22 this year)
Mine could be retrieved right now out of my wallet lying on a tray in my living room. I also don't have children, so I'm not particularly concerned personally. I haven't caught my dogs buying anything online yet.
I'd watched NurdRage's video [1] on how to extract lithium from a certain type of battery and thought that sounded like fun, so I asked my father to help me get the batteries needed. When he then asked me why I needed this specific type of (not cheap) battery, I showed him [1] and he said "That looks dangerous and fun, let's do it together" (or something to that effect).
One hour and some needle nose pliers later, we're down one battery and a burn hole in our bathroom tiles (as a result of a lithium fire that my father immediately suffocated), but up a bonding experience.
Had I tried to disassemble the battery alone (ignoring for a moment how I'd have gotten my hands on it in the first place without my father's knowledge, perhaps by stealing a credit card or with an Alexa's assistance, as other posters have suggested might happen), I probably would have attempted to extinguish the burning lithium by pouring water on it, which I'm sure would have gone excellently :).
I guess the moral of my story is that it's probably more effective to try to earn your kids' trust and ensure their safety yourself, rather than attempt to child-proof the rest of the world (with the assumption that your children will be going behind your back in their attempts to earn Darwin awards in new and exciting ways).
Agreed, cash is harder to trace
Here in Germany, it's absolutely no problem for kids aged 8 to go to school on their own.
On the other hand, we offer public transport and our cities are walkable...
Where and when don't we allow children to wander around the city by themselves?
In many large cities, kids are expected to use public transit to get to/from school. It's not unknown for parents to send kids on errands. And, how does the kid get to the park?
This "kids can't go anywhere alone" idea is very new.
My Mom complained that the one route that I never used to go to/from school is the one that she showed me.
I work in a company in Berlin that has job applicants from many different countries, including the US. Common question during the process (we generally require relocation at this point) are:
- "Can my 12yo children go somewhere alone? I'm from Portland/similar and this is not the case here and it's why we're moving."
- "We've been looking and it's really hard to find an apartment in Berlin. We have this ground-floor option, but they just shot the ground-floor windows in across the street here again this morning. Is ground floor safe in Berlin?
I'm no longer surprised when it comes up, but it's quite sad.
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/articles/parents-ultimate-g...
The truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
[...]
David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.
[...]
David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.
[...]
Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother’s potting shed in Golf Manor. Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that “what he told me went right over my head.” One thing still sticks out, though. David’s potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. “He’d say, `One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”
https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scou...
If someone has excellent knowledge of science and us willing to spend years of effort on a project, normal societal guardrails can't stop them. Whethervfir good or ill