Nanotech Fear Peddlers Are Back, Insisting ‘Here Be Monsters’
I was going to make this a 2011 nanotech year-in-review column, but then I got to thinking about one of the biggest threats that could face nanotech in 2012. The nanotech Luddites are back with their “precautionary principle” — a philosophy that says whatever fears environmental fringe groups concoct must surely be true because there have been no studies to contradict them. Therefore, here be monsters.
“Friends of the Earth” (quotation marks are mine, since their actions call into question whether they are, indeed, allies of my home planet) is one such group.
Just because they say they are friends of the earth, does not make it so. In fact, they have an anti-technology agenda, the same kinds of folks who ensured that “genetically modified foods” is a dirty phrase in some parts of the world, contributing further to world hunger. Many people have suffered due to lack of access to technology based on the say-so of groups with this kind of agenda. They are not environmentalists, as many in the mainstream media say. They are environmental activists. I would even take the environmental out of it. They are one-issue Luddites who take the hammer to anything that they consider “unnatural.”
h/t to Instapundit.
