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The recent death of Leonard Nimoy led me to ponder what we might glean from science fiction about the everyday hazards of the sort that are the focus of this blog. It seems that in the future, everyone will live in a world (more correctly, on worlds) where every household will be safe and all products on the market will be risk-free (whether purchased or in a civilization where money is no longer used).
Toxic substances occasionally did make an appearance on Star Trek: for example, the Klingon nerve gas theragen, aka Qab in the native tongue. And the closest link to an everyday hazard that boldly came up may be Tar, the generic Klingon for poison—potentially interpretable as an allusion to the standardized metric for the toxic content of cigarettes.
Apropos of cigarettes, one contrarian approach to the future is the comedic device in which every hazard we worry about today is later proved to be benign. Or, as the scientist in Woody Allen’s Sleeper says, encouraging the hapless protagonist to take a smoke, “It’s tobacco—it’s one of the healthiest things for your body.’‘
Environmental catastrophe is a mainstay of dystopic fictions, most frequently infectious and especially blood-borne (think zombies) or radioactive (think Godzilla), but sometimes chemical pollution is the culprit as well. And even though, especially in television science fiction, the most serious occupational hazard usually is being an ensign no one has encountered before, bad industrial work also can play a part in some dystopias. The dismal conditions in the coal mines of District 12 (Hunger Games) is one recent example.
But the most concrete connection between science fiction and a hazard that might be brought into the home is the limited, very pricey first edition (1953) of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (a novel about an future age where all books are burned), specially bound in Johns Mansville Quinterra, “an asbestos material with exceptional resistance to pyrolysis.”
Since the future is, after all, the stuff of fantasy and because I am free to choose a utopian rather than dystopian vision, here is my science fiction scenario for a few changes that might someday make this blog an anachronism:
- Pre-market testing and approval of new chemical substances, before they are commercially introduced
- A worldwide ban on the sale or importation of asbestos or asbestos products
- Trade which is not free to products made without appropriate worker safety and health protections
- Consumers taking responsibility that their purchases have no hidden subsidy of another’s health or life
- Governmental regulators having the resources and the political will to fully enforce the law
Feel free to add to this list. And live long and prosper!
