Robert Brockway - Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

• Denial

• Anger

• Bargaining

• Acceptance

• Grief fucking

Take, for instance, the scientists over at Kraft foods—scientists whose job, ordinarily, probably consists of formulating the perfect Dora the Explorer pasta shape-to-cheese ratio—are instead currently working on new types of nanoparticles to add to beverages. They plan to create “interactive beverages” that will shift colors and patterns according to your input. So on the plus side, you can have green beer whenever you want it, but the trade-off is that it’s potentially full of superpoisons . Some would argue that these risks dramatically outweigh the benefits here, but those people probably haven’t spent their entire lives wishing beyond hope that their Coke would turn pink when they rubbed it. Clearly, those bastards just don’t understand the dream.

• Angry Cherry

• Depression Blueberry

• Jealous-Rage Sour Apple

• On-the-Prowl Pink

• Willing-to-Settle Gray

OK, so nanoparticles aren’t exactly murderous microscopic robots. They actually have a lot of positive effects, and are being used in vastly increasing numbers across myriad products, from paint to socks, makeup to underwear. Their upsides are easy to see: They can have a lot of useful effects, cost very little to produce, and take up almost no space in existing products. Most of what we know about them is quite beneficial; it’s the stuff we don’t know that’s worrisome.

Back in March 2002, the EPA found the first inklings of the problems to come, when a study they’d conducted found nanoparticles cropping up in the livers of research animals. This warranted urgent further study, seeing as how nanotech was on the verge of becoming the world’s largest emerging industry. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center quickly confirmed that at least one kind of nanoparticle could indeed penetrate the skin, and from there seep into the bloodstream. Those particles are called quantum dots, and they’re on the smaller end of the nanoparticle scale. They are often used in makeup and sunblock, which is unfortunate, considering how they seep through skin like that—but even more unfortunate when you consider that UV light, like from the sun, actually facilitates absorption of the dots. So the thing you use to protect yourself from the sun is actually rendered harmful and then activated and inserted into your body by the mere presence of sunlight. Apparently the engineers in charge of quantum dot production got their doctorates in Irony from Incompetent University.

“Pentetratin’ you like you know you like it since 2002.”

Separate research conducted by scientists at Purdue University concentrated on tracking the likelihood of other nanoparticles, called buckyballs, infiltrating human systems—be it through water, soil, or the fatty tissue of the livestock we consume. And they found that there was indeed a pretty high chance of these buckyballs attaching to our own fatty tissues—even more so than DDT, the notoriously harmful pesticide. Now, to be fair, it was not outright stated in the study that buckyballs do anything worse than DDT once they get in there, but this comparison was specified in the report. That’s like conducting research that concludes that adorable bunnies are ten times more likely to be found in your home than murderous serial killers. Sure, it’s innocuous enough information, but when you phrase it like that it’s clearly going to scare the shit out of everybody.

• “You’ve got more white blood cells than a vampire Klan meeting.”

• “You’ve got a higher semen count than your whorish mother’s mouth.”

• “You’ve got an ‘A’! And an ‘I’ and a ‘D’ and an ‘S’!”

But nobody was entirely sure what these revelations really meant for humanity at the time; as one panel member, Vicki Colvin, professor and director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University in Texas, put it:

One thing we’ve concluded is whatever these things [nanomaterials] are going to do, they’re not inert. What will they do when they get in the environment, and what will they do when they get into people?

If seeing that sort of fearful uncertainty from people who typically really know their shit has you a little worried—don’t be! That worry is totally premature; I would save it for later… when things get worse.

When the EPA finally decided that this stuff needed to be regulated way back in 2008, they started the Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program, which requested that companies send in safety records for their environmental research efforts in the field of nanotechnology. The only catch? This program was completely voluntary, and the companies could omit literally anything they didn’t feel like sharing. So basically the EPA asked large, profit-motivated companies to pinky swear that “everything was cool,” and then followed up by asking them if it was “for realsies.” And if there’s one thing that massive corporations have shown they take seriously, it’s the honor system.

Later, a member of the EPA council, Mark Wiesner, director of the Center for the Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology at Duke University and former director of the Environmental and Energy Systems Institute at Rice University, took the art of issuing worryingly ambiguous statements even further when he went on record with his concerns about large-scale nanoproduction, stating, “People talk about incorporating nanotubes in composites that might be used in tires. When you drive tires around, they wear down, and so nanotubes will be passed around in the environment. Where does this stuff go? What will be its interaction with the environment? Is it the next best thing to sliced bread, or the next asbestos?”

• Sliced bread

• Kittens

• Warm cookies

• Alan Thicke

• Mayonnaise

• Awkward high fives

• Asbestos

So he’s really just trying to say that there might be cause for concern here; he just worded it as vaguely, and as threateningly, as possible. He might as well state that this scenario is either a chocolate bar or a hand grenade; it’s either a new puppy or a furious grizzly bear; either multiple orgasms or blindfolded chain-saw surgery.

As far from comforting as Wiesner’s creepy PR statements are, it starts to get worse when you realize that he’s being literal. See, carbon nanotubes closely resemble asbestos fibers in shape: They’re elongated, thin, and bar shaped. But the tubes are not typically as dangerous as asbestos, because they have a tendency to group together, which alters their overall shape and thus renders them harmless. However, if they do split into single fibers, they can then inflict the same kind of damage that long-term exposure to asbestos has, like serious respiratory problems, and even cancer, say the results of a 2008 study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology . So it’s probably not such a great thing that a large area of current nanotech research is dedicated solely to finding methods that make sure these things don’t clump together, but rather stay separated into their tiny, thin, deadly form. After all, asbestos wasn’t all bad: Before it started killing people, it made somebody like a billion dollars!