I’m sure this has been done before, but I’m not sure what search terms to use in the search engine to find the thread.
Anyway, smoking wasn’t always considered bad. Now it is one of the worst things you can do for your health. Antibiotics are rapidly becoming seen as a danger (because they screw up microbiomes which creates illnesses in itself, and create antibiotic resistant bacteria when overused). Up until a few years ago antibiotics were considered fairly harmless.
What things we now consider benign will be considered dangerous in the future?
My money is on cell phones. They are dangerous for a wide range of reasons.
[ul]
[li]People use their cell phones as MP3 players. due to constant listening of high volume music people are damaging their hearing[/li]
[li]Texing while driving is dangerous[/li]
[li]Cell phones can cause brain tumors[/li]
[li]Constantly looking down at your phone is bad for your spine[/li]
[li]E-communication is never going to replace the need for human contact via face to face interaction. Much communication is non-verbal and you lose that via texting. Too much social media can cause depression. [/li]
[li]Cell phones are covered in germs (some studies have found meningitis, antibiotic resistant bacteria, etc[/li]
[li]Cell phone use may cause eye damage[/li][/ul]
Cell phones as we currently know them may be seen in 50 years as devices that cause car wrecks, cancer, social isolation, hearing loss, eye problems and spinal problems. I’m sure we will still have them but they won’t be viewed as innocent, and they will be designed to avoid these problems.
no, they can’t. radio is not ionizing radiation. radio frequencies live in the range of 400 kHz to 30 GHz range. electromagnetic radiation doesn’t become ionizing until you get up into the hundreds of THz.
yes, and sitting at your desk with your monitor at an incorrect height is too. nothing new.
Everything is covered in “germs.” A sterile environment is bad.
I don’t agree about cell phones, because we still have cars. Society accepts a pretty horrible death and injury rate if it makes things convenient enough. Plus cars contribute heavily to pollution and climate change. Cell phones are incredibly convenient devices, considered so essential nowadays that even the poorest people make sure to acquire them.
But it’s still a cool thread. I was just hearing someone tell me how they cut their baby’s umbilical cord at the hospital and I was actually surprised that hospitals let fathers still do that. Given how many benign things corporations fear to let people do because of fear of lawsuits, I’d think they’d want to take control over any process that involved sharp objects. And I imagine it’ll just take one drunk father and one lawsuit before that tradition goes away.
Circumcision is also under attack in some quarters as unnecessary male genital mutilation. which is true, but some things are so much a part of religious or even cultural tradition, and the harm done is relatively small, that I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Women seem to prefer men to be circumcised anyway.
Given that it’s almost illegal to free range parent(otherwise known as “parenting”) these days, it wouldn’t surprise me. Although I’ll fight that one to the end. Parents and children get to make that choice. You already have to get permission to do any sport, contact or otherwise. That’s more than good enough.
Isn’t that the fate of most diet and exercise fads? It’s really weird how we’ve understood how to lose weight for centuries yet there’s always something new that promises to do it better. Have any of these ideas ever passed scientific muster and actually helped us lose weight faster than just calorie restriction and exercise?
I’m not sure about being considered dangerous but I think that in a generation or two alcohol consumption will become marginalized. Much like cigarette smoking. When I started smoking, and drinking, as a teen it was just a normal decision that young folks made. By the time I had kids in school smokers were being treated like they were mentally deficient. My kids nagged me about my smoking.
After I quit my only regret was that I hadn’t done it long before as smoking had nothing to offer me. Last year I gave up drinking using the same basic method and it had the same effect. I realized that I would have been a lot better off if I had given it up many years ago, particularly financially. For this reason I can see similar societal forces making drinking less popular. Maybe it doesn’t seem likely but it didn’t with smoking either.
No. Your implicitly proposed policy of some government agency telling people what they may believe and teach re: religion will be recognized as despotic. And I write that as an atheist.
Yeah, but we’re not just referring to government regulation, but also social pressure. At least I think this thread encompasses that.
Assuming it does, it could very well be that more and more parents will let children choose their own religion rather than just being indoctrinated into the family religion. Heck, some parents are choosing to not even assign a gender to their kids. That seems a lot more radical than not giving them a religion.
For what it’s worth, my grandfather raised me and he was a pious Jew. Yet I barely heard about Judaism for the first 10 years of my life and never once set foot in a synagogue. He’d leave me at home(which was also something you could do back then but not now). When we learned about some religions at school, I kinda liked the idea of being a Methodist and told him. He said, “Fine.” I did end up being a pretty orthodox Jew myself as a teen, but not because he made an active effort to encourage it.
I’d prefer alcohol to be judged as beneficial for your health in moderation - as it’s been used for millenia - and all highly processed, junk foods go the way of tobacco.
Cell phones could possibly be viewed as bad for mental health, in that people will use them for interaction more than face to face dialogue, but great for information and entertainment. Saying that, an avid user might just be seen as a modern day bookworm.
I think no-pulp fruit juices are rapidly being viewed as just sugary water with some flavor added.
And some ways to exercise, for example excessive high intensity training, will be viewed as giving you very little in health benefits, or those benefits being outweighed by the drawbacks.
