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The Forbidden Island

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Re: The Forbidden Island

#31

Post by rndmize »

derleth wrote: post #18

Just think: A life without the damage wrought by modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine! Where if you get sick with something that a week's worth of pills would clear right up, you're gonna die in pain! Paradise! Yep, nothing quite like the Noble Savage, who has the dignity to die of something you've only heard about in old novels.

As compared to the Civilized Man, who has only solidly developed all the things you describe in the last couple hundred years and took thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now?

Nothing quite like the modern man, where some tiny percentage of the world enjoys all its fruits and a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming, which by most anthropological analysis is a much worse life that the hunter/gatherer tribes of 10,000 years past.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#32

Post by tnjm »

derleth wrote: post #24
tnjm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. It's clear they know the outside world exists. They have chosen not to engage. (To put it mildly.) As an aside, there are more than 100 'uncontacted' tribes in the world. All of them know of the outside world; all have chosen -- for now -- not to interact directly with mainstream society.

> But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. How much do they really know, though? Do they know that some of their diseases could be cured, for example?

I've been fortunate enough to interview several tribal people who were only recently 'contacted'. The latest came out of the forest in 2009.

What is striking is how many of their friends and relatives died of outsiders' disease after making contact, and how fondly they spoke of their life before. When I spoke to them, some were considering leaving the village where they now live and returning to a life in the forest.

With regards to healthcare -- the health services offered to settled tribal and indigenous people in many places is poor to nonexistent. Amazonian tribal peoples have dozens to hundreds of medicinal plants, many of which have been proven to have active pharmacological properties. Some are now used in Western medicine.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#33

Post by lukifer »

6ren wrote: post #23
derleth wrote: post #18

Just think: A life without the damage wrought by modern antibiotics, dentistry, surgery, and preventative medicine! Where if you get sick with something that a week's worth of pills would clear right up, you're gonna die in pain! Paradise! Yep, nothing quite like the Noble Savage, who has the dignity to die of something you've only heard about in old novels.

The archaeological record shows that tooth decay increased dramatically with agriculture, and prior to that, was much less frequent than today. It's one step forward, two steps back - at least, for dentistry. Many of our dramatically beneficial advances - such as covered sewage and vitamin-supplemented bread - solve problems that did not exist for less densely populated hunter-gatherers. The big problem for them was…

Don't forget the other major problem that civilization solved really well: infant mortality. (Unless you take the Malthusian perspective and see it as a boon to population management.)

Re: The Forbidden Island

#34

Post by adrianb »

ambuj wrote: post #27

This is interesting too - "An expedition led by Maurice Vidal Portman, a government administrator who hoped to research the natives and their customs, accomplished a successful landing on North Sentinel Island in January 1880. The group found a network of pathways and several small, abandoned villages. After several days, six Sentinelese were captured and taken to Port Blair. They soon became sick, and two of them di…

It's described in the article as well:

"Finally, after several days on the island, the party stumbled across an elderly couple who were too old to run away, and several small children. Portman brought the two adults and four of the children back to Port Blair. But the man and the woman soon started to get sick and then died, probably from exposure to Western diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which they would have had little or no resistance. So Portman returned the four children to North Sentinel Island and released them with gifts for the rest of the tribe. The children disappeared into the jungle and were never seen again. "

Re: The Forbidden Island

#35

Post by user24 »

StavrosK wrote: post #17
dirktheman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would freak them out. A metal bird, making strange humming noise, hovering over their heads... A couple of years ago I was driving on the I-95 from Las Vegas to Tonopah. Out of nowhere, a predator drone came up and flew next to our car for a good couple of hundred yards. A strange and somewhat frightening experience, even for someone who knows what drones are. Besides, the thick jungle canopy wouldn't allo…

How long do you think it'll be until drone hunting is a widespread sport? Although, the only place with enough hunting rifles is the US, and it's probably not going to be popular there.

http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_23676390?source=comme...

Re: The Forbidden Island

#36

Post by kaybe »

derleth wrote: post #24
tnjm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. It's clear they know the outside world exists. They have chosen not to engage. (To put it mildly.) As an aside, there are more than 100 'uncontacted' tribes in the world. All of them know of the outside world; all have chosen -- for now -- not to interact directly with mainstream society.

> But... the choice is theirs, not yours or mine. How much do they really know, though? Do they know that some of their diseases could be cured, for example?

But then, some of the plants in the jungle seem to be amazing. I read some books about expeditions to find them for western medicine. One talked about a black paste you put on a tooth and it will simply fall out, no pain and no problem. A plant that makes women infertile for 7 years (they give it to their teenagers, apparently). Also, great plants against many sorts of other problems like abscesses.

Sadly, the results simply got ignored. The woman in the book was sent by a US pharmy company and brought back many plants and samples which she had won from the tribes in hard work (they don't just tell anyone). They probably still have them in a freezer somewhere.

An experienced person I talked to said that it probably was too much trouble and costs to clear it for drugs since there often are side effects, often psychological. He took one or two of the jungle things and said it was intense. Still, it's a great loss for our civilisation that it played out like this so far.

So, we'd have much to give, but also much to gain. Our diseases could be cured too.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#37

Post by StavrosK »

user24 wrote: post #35
StavrosK wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think it'll be until drone hunting is a widespread sport? Although, the only place with enough hunting rifles is the US, and it's probably not going to be popular there.

http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_23676390?source=comme...

Hah, nice!

Re: The Forbidden Island

#39

Post by kaybe »

finnw wrote: post #28
dirktheman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would freak them out. A metal bird, making strange humming noise, hovering over their heads... A couple of years ago I was driving on the I-95 from Las Vegas to Tonopah. Out of nowhere, a predator drone came up and flew next to our car for a good couple of hundred yards. A strange and somewhat frightening experience, even for someone who knows what drones are. Besides, the thick jungle canopy wouldn't allo…

Why would it freak them out any more than the helicopters which they have seen before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLErPqqCC54

They look pretty freaked out to me. Their gazes are out of this world, very intense.

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