Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Forbidden Island

neatorama.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 288 posts

Re: The Forbidden Island

#51

Post by eshvk »

geuis wrote: post #45

I'm pretty late to leaving a comment, so it won't get a lot of exposure. Let's just leave these people the fuck alone. What threat are they under? Curious assholes like us. There are probably less than 1000 people on that island, all descended from people tens of thousands of years ago. There are more people than that that visit an Apple store on a Tuesday before 2pm. Leave them alone. We don't need to assuage our 10…

Why leave them alone?

(I have my own reasons why they should or shouldn't be left alone. I am just curious to figure out why you are so insistent that they be left alone.)

Re: The Forbidden Island

#52

Post by eshvk »

rndmize wrote: post #31
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 l…

> 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?

Are you trying to tell me that these "noble savages" didn't have war, didn't have famine or inequality?

Re: The Forbidden Island

#53

Post by JonnieCache »

eshvk wrote: post #51
geuis wrote: post #45

I'm pretty late to leaving a comment, so it won't get a lot of exposure. Let's just leave these people the fuck alone. What threat are they under? Curious assholes like us. There are probably less than 1000 people on that island, all descended from people tens of thousands of years ago. There are more people than that that visit an Apple store on a Tuesday before 2pm. Leave them alone. We don't need to assuage our 10…

Why leave them alone? (I have my own reasons why they should or shouldn't be left alone. I am just curious to figure out why you are so insistent that they be left alone.)

A. it is clearly what they want.

B. contact with us is likely to be deadly to them.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#54

Post by chrischen »

geuis wrote: post #45

I'm pretty late to leaving a comment, so it won't get a lot of exposure. Let's just leave these people the fuck alone. What threat are they under? Curious assholes like us. There are probably less than 1000 people on that island, all descended from people tens of thousands of years ago. There are more people than that that visit an Apple store on a Tuesday before 2pm. Leave them alone. We don't need to assuage our 10…

That is what they are doing. In fact, the article (or Wikipedia), says India has already made it illegal/discouraged to go near the island.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#55

Post by ekianjo »

kaybe wrote: post #36
derleth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 result…

Plants are limited resources. Even if you wanted to make drugs out of it, it does not scale very well. That's why most of our drugs are synthetic. That's scalable chemistry. Analyzing active ingredients in plants is a lengthy and costly process. And even if they worked as advertised, you would need to go through clinical trials to have them accepted in other countries. You don't put drugs on the market just like that.

Net, it's very costly and it's been tried before, as far as I know, on several plants from the Amazon area. I need to find the source again, but from what I remember most plants failed against placebo. There's probably a lot of placebo effect in the efficacy claimed by people living in these areas.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#56

Post by chrischen »

dirktheman wrote: post #43
derleth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here? > The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. This is a point I wish I had made.

I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here. Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well i…

If an asteroid hits the Earth, who do you think will be best equipped to survive? Pretty sure whoever dies in that circumstance is the loser.

I'm sure the dinosaurs were happy by their standards as well, but they're basically irrelevant now.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#57

Post by eshvk »

joering2 wrote: post #5

as one of the comments from the article points out to google map: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=North+Sentinel+Island&ll=11.5... looking at this island (looks huge!), am I the only one who feel so sick and tired of what the US government does to its people and our land, that I want to fill up my jetski and just head that way? Only if the tank was large enough... Edit: zoom out on the island.. and think about this: s…

> looking at this island (looks huge!), am I the only one who feel so sick and tired of what the US government does to its people and our land, that I want to fill up my jetski and just head that way? Only if the tank was large enough...

Yeah, you should actually try going and living in some of these luddite paradises that you think exist. I grew up in Ethiopia. Very luddite. No U.S. government there either. Except people used to get shot on the streets and their family used to get charged for the bullets used to shoot them.

> somewhere under the green down there there are living people like me and you that do not know what internet is... or cell phones.. or ipads.. cable TV... anything..

I was in Bhutan a few months back. Just me, a few rich people trying to find themselves, no cell phones or ipads or whatever. It was paradise. Except you know, half a million people who had lived for six generations there had been shipped off the country unceremoniously. [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/opinion/bhutan-is-no-shang...

Re: The Forbidden Island

#58

Post by chrischen »

dirktheman wrote: post #15
terhechte wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always fly drones around. Edit: Non-Lethal, Non-Army drones. Just flying cameras to see what's happening there, or how they're living. Even better, really small cameras that look a bit like slow-moving birds.

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…

Haha. I think the army was doing target practice on you. They usually practice targeting the drones on unsuspecting cars in that area.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#59

Post by VMG »

dirktheman wrote: post #43
derleth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here? > The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. This is a point I wish I had made.

I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here. Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well i…

> But those are our standards, not theirs

I think it is fair to assume that health and life are universal standards. I'm willing to bet on in.

Re: The Forbidden Island

#60

Post by muyuu »

dirktheman wrote: post #43
derleth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, nobody disputes that they have better teeth than my circa 1800 ancestors did, but I very likely have better teeth than they do now, so who really wins here? > The big problem for them was carrying capacity, meaning you had to migrate, fight the tribe next door... or practice infanticide. Overcoming these is the true achievement of our age. This is a point I wish I had made.

I get your point, and I think we can all agree that our standards of living are WAY better than theirs, but by OUR standards. Yes, our life expectancy is better, we have better teeth, we are healthier, we get to use all the shiny stuff that comes with our civilization. But those are our standards, not theirs. So there's no 'winner' here. Look at native Americans. They were also 'savages', and we didn't do very well i…

They seem to live their lives essentially worry-free and they take care of each other. There are records of elderly population.

They seem to like it the way they have it and seeing that their neighbouring tribesmen were either massacred or suffered extremely lethal epidemics, they seem to have achieved the most evolutionarily intelligent behaviour of the region by keeping strangers the fuck away from their island.

Post reply on HN