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Radium watches, on the other hand, were quite dangerous.

As noted in another comment, I wouldn't consider Polonium to be "harmless."

But I grew up in an environment that would cause most parents, today, to defecate masonry. I grew up in Africa, and we had some really fun critters going through our backyard, like Black Mambas, Gaboon Vipers, and even the damn bugs were nasty. Bug bites could hurt for a month.

I somehow survived.

>Radium watches, on the other hand, were quite dangerous.

Citation needed. Radium paint was hazardous to workers making the watches, but alpha particles aren't getting through the crystal or movement and there's not a huge risk to wearing them.

Probably right. I was thinking about the factories, in retrospect. I believe that many of the workers ingested it.

Also, back then, they had radium philters (tonics).

Yeah, and while handling radium paint on a daily basis probably isn't the best, they ingested a lot more radium than you would from just being around it all day. Radium paint had been deemed non-toxic, and so the standard operating procedure for the factory workers was to "point" the tips of the brushes using their lips.

Ya, there are lots of "radioactive" glowing things safely used every day. But people get scared when things glow green because Hollywood tells them to fear glowing things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_radioluminescence#Smal...

To be fair Tritium's half-life is significantly less than radium. You really don't want to be breathing any radium dust if you can at all avoid it, which is a good reason we stopped putting it in things. But if it's in a sealed container (like a watch that isn't smashed/cracked up) surrounded by a few millimeters of material it's not going to be a big deal even if it's on your wrist for years.

And it is a metal watch. On the user's wrist. I wouldnt sleep with the dial under my toungue, but at literal arm's length it would be fine.

I went to our local museum carrying my tritium marker to see if I could induce some trails on their radiation cloud chamber. Boy was I disappointed that I could not create a single trace from it. The plastic encasing seems to protect pretty well (like 100%) from beta radiation.

At first I thought this was just a toy, until I got to the Polonium-210. Holy cow. Wikipedia calls it "highly radioactive" and "extremely dangerous to humans" and says that "has the ability to become airborne with ease." Wonder how many kids managed to ingest it. This is the stuff that was used to poison Alexander Litvinenko.

But it was just "minute traces."

Likely zero, as it was encapsulated with resin. They would have had to grind the ring to dust and then eat the whole damned thing.

It was also commonly in record and camera cleaning brushes, as it could be used to induce a static charge, which would attract dust. Likewise, encapsulated, so the risk with normal use was minimal, but again, if you ground the brush to dust and ate it, all bets are off.

But it was a spinthariscope. If the resin blocked all the alpha particles, then they wouldn't produce the visible flashes in the screen. It seems more likely that the radioactive substance would be embedded in the surface of the resin. And therefore eating it would still allow it to damage your tissues.

> Likely zero <…> They would have had to grind the ring to dust and then eat the whole damned thing.

Never had kids, huh?

They could eat the resin and be fine. I’ve never seen a kid grind hard substances into a fine powder and then inject them.

I've seen many rings in stomachs and throats, in the emergency room...

Which, aside from the chocking hazard, would be absolutely fine here. No radiological concern.

Until it dissolves forty years down the line, like many do.

At which point there’s no polonium left. It has a half-life measured in days.

That's more like teenage behavior, to be honest.

Plenty of strange things were sold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_ore_Revigator

They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Or, to paraphrase, people just don’t die like they used to.

This is no set of lawn darts!

Here me out... glow in the dark, polonium jarts!

The last century was so exciting and filled with wonder of technology and the future. Unfortunately, popular feelings are somehow much more negative now, even though we've still got mind-boggling technology being developed like AI, self driving cars, cheaper access to space, autonomous drones, and even finally flying cars are being attempted in a new and more hopeful way than before. I blame climate change for a culture of negativity.

More like the 1960s. For example, looking at old National Geographics and pop sci magazines you see an incredible optimism and respect for science, engineering, and the orgs that did them. All those "atomics of the future"-type stuff.

What changed was that the wall of secrecy broke down and stories of pollution, corruption, and all around bad behavior hit the public like a tsunami. Then we learned that governments had been lying to us over things like Vietnam, with the Pentagon Papers, Watergate etc. Pretty hard to be positive after that. The computerization of the 1970s through 1990s was broadly positively perceived until the 2000s when it became undeniable that Big Tech would do anything to harvest users. Cambridge Analytica. Cutting off Netscape's air supply. Embrace, extend, and extinguish. There are not many reasons to be optimistic.

I think that was more of the 1950’s, to be pedantic. The 60’s was starting to be more scary with the turning up of the Cold War.

Climate change is the source of negativity? In the 90s there was the hole in the ozone layer. Instead of acting like the slack jawed idiots in the current administration and basically saying “LOL FUCK YOU NERDS”, we banned CFCs.

Nothing you listed actually helps most people.

AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.

Self Driving Car*. Waymo, everything else is trash. Mostly putting a human out of a job.

Access to space? Great for academics and strategic defense. Maybe the common man will get some transport benefit out of it? Not yet.

Autonomous drones? So we can kill each other better. Oh and the drone shows, definitely worth it.

Flying cars? Ha. Hahaha. Ok. A trained pilot got crashed into while landing at an airport, this year. It’s not going to be a thing without being fully autonomous. But killing people probably makes more money.

You're talking pragmatically like someone who's not excited about the future. Of course you can find problems with any technology if you feel negative about it. These things aren't exciting because they clearly meet some need with no harmful side effects but because they leave a wide open future of unknown possibilities.

Yes autonomy is how modern flying cars are expected to be controlled. That's one of the enabling technologies, that you could imagine (if you're excited about the future) leads to a Jetsons style streams of cars in the sky where it's too complex for humans to pilot them directly.

> AI? Another way for untalented people to fake it and profit.

You could also call it another way for untalented people to provide value to society. You want to gatekeep productive work to some elites who "deserve" to profit from it even if that means limiting the amount of good it can do to everyone. You want to stop the world getting better? Why? To protect "talented" people's rent-seeking?

The ozone hole is still appearing annually, btw.

https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Each year for the past few decades during the Southern Hemisphere spring, chemical reactions involving chlorine and bromine cause ozone in the southern polar region to be destroyed rapidly and severely. This depleted region is known as the “ozone hole”

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/38685/the-ozone-lay...

The last century also brought us world wars and racism at all costs. The so called "great generation" (What a joke!), could very well have destroyed all of mankind. Then there's the "boomers". (my godforsaken generation) We have gone out of our way to politically ruin our nation, all for the sake of a lunatic, reality TV star who only cares about power and money. (A convicted felon was elected president?!?) Our vanity knows no bounds!

Now you're praising technologies that won't help the poor or make most people's lives more meaningful because they will be monetized to the point of uselessness. Sheesh!

> monetized to the point of uselessness

If they become useless, they won't have a place in the market anymore. Do you really believe self-driving cars will never be useful because the companies controlling them will try to extract too much profit?

Yes, because poor people and others won't be able to afford the products. The more the underfunded people don't get to use the technology, the more it become useless.

Who even knows if they actually put anything in there lol