One of the worries around graphene and other nano materials is that we'll see a re-run of the asbestos disaster. Once thought to be a fantastic material that saw widespread adoption because of its useful properties asbestos became a pariah material once the link with lungcancer was made.
Asbestos and graphene have some elements in common (mostly: very thin needle like particles), which could lead to similar trouble (lungcancer).
A fair point, but people apparently don't care. It shocks me how people stress about their cell phone giving them cancer (or windmills giving them headaches, supposedly) while willingly inhaling automobile exhaust and complaining that attempts to address this are somehow impinging upon their freedom.
It's because, for many, the car represents freedom. As in, freedom to go wherever they want. To not rely on someone else's transport. It sounds silly to me, but apparently that's how many people think.
I think it's also because people think they know how to assess the risks of cars. They think of crashes, maybe, as the primary (if not sole) risk. They don't know of anyone who's ever died from car exhaust, apart from perhaps a carbon monoxide suicide.
Cell phones are newer things in people's lives. There's less established understanding of what they can do. Combined with a general fear of radiation, and the associated risks of cancer, and it's easier to believe you'll get cancer from a phone than from car exhaust.
Think about that. Most people don't know anyone who has died from exhaust, but almost everyone knows someone who has been involved in a crash. We might not be sufficiently afraid of cars, but I think rating the danger of crashes above exhaust is reasonable.
Most people know somebody whose emphysema, cancer, or other air-pollution related disease was at least exacerbated by exhaust. They just don't know that they do. This could even be you a few decades hence.
Ironically this is similar to the danger posed by low-level radiation releases (except exhaust is far more dangerous), except everyone freaks out when their local radiation levels are 10% above baseline, but nobody cares when local pm2.5 levels are 20% above baseline. (They do notice at 1000%, to their credit).
This is a shame, and I speak as somebody who really enjoys a good road trip. Cars, when used as a primary (not supplementary) means of transport, are an utter menace to walkers, cyclists, and as we've established, people who breathe air. Maybe I'm biased since I was a bicyclist in LA for 18 months, but they destroy cities, kill people in droves, and of course aren't great for Earth. Nevermind the fact that walkers, cyclists, and public transportation users now have to cross much farther distances because two thirds of the land in that godforsaken hellhole is auto infrastructure, or subsidize automobile ownership with taxes that support street parking and parking minimums making it illegal to open a restaurant or build an apartment building without OCEANS of parking because the local NIMBY's complain about how they might have less convenient access to unlimited, taxpayer-subsidized automobile storage.
Anyway, back to graphene. As amazing as these materials sound I worry greatly about their environmental impact. What do you do when your lungs are full of graphene? Your blood stream? It seems unlikely the liver is well-suited to removing it from the body.
That's true. And that's a real issue. But asbestos is now banned for fairly good reasons, the benefits did not outweigh the downsides in the eyes of the regulators.
And that's the right way to approach things like this, evaluate the ups a material offers compared to the downs.
People will die (for the foreseeable future at least), the question is what they die of and if you can prevent some of those deaths without a high price to society then you should do so.
Consider roads, people die there as well, but the price we'd pay if we shut all the roads down would be prohibitive so we don't. (pretty apt for me because I witnessed the most gruesome traffic accident 4 days ago in Germany near Dinslaken).
You say that as if "just shutting down all roads" were, however modified, at all a sensible thing to suggest, unless you number among your desiderata the messy collapse of the existing civilization, to be replaced by one which doesn't rely on a road transport network for survival.
Shutting down many of the roads in cities, where the effects of cars are most pronounced, wouldn't remotely cause the "messy collapse of the existing civilization", and is a meaningful partial step.
Oh, well, that's much more reasonable, of course; it's not civilization entire you'd like to see collapse, just cities.
How do you imagine this working, pray? "Build lots of trains" I expect to feature prominently in any response you might make, and that's fine as far as it goes. How do you envision their cargo making its way from there? Cities depend on endless fleets of grumbling, farting trucks, which of course no one loves, and presumably by now you'll have scrapped them all and had them melted down for their steel. But that leaves tons upon tons of goods -- tons and tons just of food and drink, every single day. How d'you plan to shift all that? Do you envision streets full of carts and horseshit? Hand-drawn wagons and barrows? Coffles of laden, staggering slaves?
Or do you instead fantasize about what in the early Cold War was called "decentralization" -- put short and simply, the enforced diaspora of millions upon millions of city dwellers into a countryside which has neither need nor desire for their presence, to say nothing of places to put them all? Oh, that'd go so much better! I'm not sure who'd hate whom worse, or where the riots would most likely start, but I'm sure that scheme would make for a stretch of history delightfully full of incident -- the sort of thing for which future high school students will find it actually worth keeping their eyes open in class, assuming future high schools reverse our modern degradation at least to the extent of resuming proper instruction in history.
Or have you some other fantastic scheme? Honesty compels me to admit that I have never yet encountered a utopian theorist whose fancies bore up under anything remotely resembling rigorous criticism, to say nothing of reality's much harsher judgment. But, while no longer young, I'm far from dead yet, and I don't imagine I've heard everything there is to hear. Perhaps you will astound me.
I wouldn't say we just "let very many people die". Vehicle emissions have improved dramatically over time[1] and will likely continue to improve.
Unlike asbestos, banning cars cold turkey would have had too large an impact on society. Could we have tried to improve car emissions quicker? Yes, but just like the asbestos industry fought regulation, the car industry did too. Yet still, as anyone who has tried to breathe in a major American city can tell you, things have gotten better
If we're getting into numbers of deaths, neither pollution or asbestos actually figure into the conversation much. It's just scary to think that our safety can change without our behavior changing.
This feels sensible. We don't know what happens; there are reasonable mechanisms of action that could be harmful; we have some experimental evidence that it could be harmful.
What we need to do now is calmly investigate ways to control pollution and toxicity, and better manage clean-up and recycling.
Modern electronics use plenty of stuff which is harmful to people and the environment. Have a look at the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana for an example of terrible consequences (human and environmental) of our poor handling of e-waste.
Its data but not information. What is the rate graphene naturally occurs? How much of a spill is significant? Its largely impossible to guess if this research is at all important without knowing the context.
At least it's a risk that can be assessed before it's put into wide-scale production and use; in the case of asbestos, it was everywhere when it was discovered to be harmful.
Somehow I doubt graphene and nanomaterials are going to be widely used in insulation and paneling. Graphene if it's used in CPU's will be encased in heat sinks and whatnot, and waste can be handled accordingly. In production, they're already processed in clean rooms with heavy filtering, so I doubt those will be a risk.
Trying not to sound too much like a pyromaniac, it might be pretty interesting to see carbon aerogel burn - after all there is little mass there so it can't produce that much energy.
Maybe good for party tricks - hold a chunk of it in your hand and set fire to it?
I remember watching a rather splendid Open University chemistry program (the closest we had to Khan Academy in the 1970s) when I was about 8 or 9 and they burned up a diamond - I was deeply impressed.
I think they heated it up then dropped it into liquid oxygen.
As I understand it, the risks of nano particles are difficult to gauge in advance because their interaction with biological systems depends in part on their surface shape. This is different from typical understandings of chemical toxicity, which depend primarily on composition and dosage.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] threadAsbestos and graphene have some elements in common (mostly: very thin needle like particles), which could lead to similar trouble (lungcancer).
see http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/graphen...
Nanomaterials have their own particular set of problems when it comes to the environmental impact.
About 5,000 people in the UK die each year from vehicle pollution.
http://bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116
Cell phones are newer things in people's lives. There's less established understanding of what they can do. Combined with a general fear of radiation, and the associated risks of cancer, and it's easier to believe you'll get cancer from a phone than from car exhaust.
Ironically this is similar to the danger posed by low-level radiation releases (except exhaust is far more dangerous), except everyone freaks out when their local radiation levels are 10% above baseline, but nobody cares when local pm2.5 levels are 20% above baseline. (They do notice at 1000%, to their credit).
Anyway, back to graphene. As amazing as these materials sound I worry greatly about their environmental impact. What do you do when your lungs are full of graphene? Your blood stream? It seems unlikely the liver is well-suited to removing it from the body.
And that's the right way to approach things like this, evaluate the ups a material offers compared to the downs.
People will die (for the foreseeable future at least), the question is what they die of and if you can prevent some of those deaths without a high price to society then you should do so.
Consider roads, people die there as well, but the price we'd pay if we shut all the roads down would be prohibitive so we don't. (pretty apt for me because I witnessed the most gruesome traffic accident 4 days ago in Germany near Dinslaken).
You say that as if just shutting down all roads without any optional way of transport is the only solution available.
Shutting down many of the roads in cities, where the effects of cars are most pronounced, wouldn't remotely cause the "messy collapse of the existing civilization", and is a meaningful partial step.
How do you imagine this working, pray? "Build lots of trains" I expect to feature prominently in any response you might make, and that's fine as far as it goes. How do you envision their cargo making its way from there? Cities depend on endless fleets of grumbling, farting trucks, which of course no one loves, and presumably by now you'll have scrapped them all and had them melted down for their steel. But that leaves tons upon tons of goods -- tons and tons just of food and drink, every single day. How d'you plan to shift all that? Do you envision streets full of carts and horseshit? Hand-drawn wagons and barrows? Coffles of laden, staggering slaves?
Or do you instead fantasize about what in the early Cold War was called "decentralization" -- put short and simply, the enforced diaspora of millions upon millions of city dwellers into a countryside which has neither need nor desire for their presence, to say nothing of places to put them all? Oh, that'd go so much better! I'm not sure who'd hate whom worse, or where the riots would most likely start, but I'm sure that scheme would make for a stretch of history delightfully full of incident -- the sort of thing for which future high school students will find it actually worth keeping their eyes open in class, assuming future high schools reverse our modern degradation at least to the extent of resuming proper instruction in history.
Or have you some other fantastic scheme? Honesty compels me to admit that I have never yet encountered a utopian theorist whose fancies bore up under anything remotely resembling rigorous criticism, to say nothing of reality's much harsher judgment. But, while no longer young, I'm far from dead yet, and I don't imagine I've heard everything there is to hear. Perhaps you will astound me.
Unlike asbestos, banning cars cold turkey would have had too large an impact on society. Could we have tried to improve car emissions quicker? Yes, but just like the asbestos industry fought regulation, the car industry did too. Yet still, as anyone who has tried to breathe in a major American city can tell you, things have gotten better
[1] http://theenergycollective.com/jamescoan/85164/vehicle-emiss...
What we need to do now is calmly investigate ways to control pollution and toxicity, and better manage clean-up and recycling.
Modern electronics use plenty of stuff which is harmful to people and the environment. Have a look at the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana for an example of terrible consequences (human and environmental) of our poor handling of e-waste.
Somehow I doubt graphene and nanomaterials are going to be widely used in insulation and paneling. Graphene if it's used in CPU's will be encased in heat sinks and whatnot, and waste can be handled accordingly. In production, they're already processed in clean rooms with heavy filtering, so I doubt those will be a risk.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153063-graphene-aerogel-i...
Maybe good for party tricks - hold a chunk of it in your hand and set fire to it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-08/burn-diamonds-torc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyuDY3iq1Q
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond
"Diamond's ignition point is 720 – 800 °C in oxygen and 850 – 1,000 °C in air."
Graphite will burn at around 1,000 Celsius as well, I would assume that graphene (which is really thin graphite) would do the same.
I think they heated it up then dropped it into liquid oxygen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mKqtT8J2ms
But I'm pretty sure this isn't the one I saw.
[1]: https://github.com/jondot/graphene
Isn't this true for millions of things that we use every day?