Earlier quoted context omitted.
we used to live malnourished, with stunted growth, women dying in childbirth to bring 8 kids into the world half of whom would die in childhood, with large numbers of men dying before they couldn't afford reading glasses they would need. (my gf was 1 of 5 surviving from 10 born, with horsedrawn transportation and starvation) all that industrialization brought us to much healthier longer lives filled with amenities un…
You do not need to convince me that industrialization is good. I agree. What troubles me is the irresponsible approach.
Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?
Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!
Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.
If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)
And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!