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Microplastics, pesticides, forever chemicals, gas stoves, ultra-processed foods—it’s as if modernity is trying to kill us.

It’s actually worse: everything is trying to kill us. Take oxygen.

Our cells use oxygen to turn nutrients into energy. Without oxygen, we quickly run out of energy and die. But there’s a catch: that process also creates free radicals, highly reactive molecules that damage our DNA. In other words, our own metabolisms are responsible for a large proportion of cancer. The geneticists Vilenchik and Knudson estimate that the damage is equivalent to 1500-2000 millisieverts of radiation per day, or a few hundred daily CT scans.

The sun, which is vital to life on Earth, also causes a great deal of DNA damage, along with seemingly innocuous foods like mushrooms, celery, parsnips, potatoes, rhubarb, and coffee.

We need many of these things to survive and modern dangers are no different.

Gas stoves give us heat, which we need to stay warm and cook food. Without heat, we die, even in tropical places. And as far as sources of heat go, gas is a very safe one, despite its CO2 emissions. Before we used gas, we burned solid fuels like coal, wood, and dung, all of which produce extremely harmful smoke. Here’s a colorful example from an ethnographic survey of peasants in Tsarist Russia:

Stoves with chimneys are called “white,” while chimneyless stoves are referred to as “black.” When a “black” stove is being lighted, the door from the main room into the entryway is left open so that the smoke up to the level of the door is drawn out, but above that level it forms a blue and white blanket through which nothing can be seen…

In the drought years of 1891–1892, around ten people in two of our small villages (each containing about fifteen households) lost their eyesight temporarily or permanently from the smoke of their stoves. The smoke, which was produced by burning dried manure and weeds found on the roadside and in ravines, was so acrid that the victims (mostly old people and children) developed cataracts. All of them were admitted to the regional hospital in town, but three of them never got their eyesight back.

As late as the 1950s, toxic fogs would settle on coal-burning cities like London, killing hundreds to thousands. In poor countries, where people still burn these fuels, household air pollution kills millions of people each year.

There’s a similar story to many modern pollutants. The pesticides people complain about today have replaced highly toxic compounds made of lead and arsenic. One of the earliest chemical insecticides, copper acetoarsenite (nicknamed “Paris Green” because of its use as pigment), has a lethal dose of roughly a teaspoon. Paris Green was eventually replaced by lead arsenate, which is much less toxic but tends to accumulate in soils, which is why you shouldn’t make a habit of foraging in old apple orchards.

Pesticides are also crucial to our survival—they are our primary defense against mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue and disasters like locust plagues—and we should be thankful that modern iterations don’t give us heavy metal poisoning.

Plastics revolutionized medicine, allowing for the production of cheap and disposable syringes, gloves, masks, and IV bags, and plastic packaging keeps our food fresh and uncontaminated. Even forever chemicals have lifesaving applications, namely extremely effective fire suppressing foams.

This is not to say that we should ignore harmful substances and pollutants. Identifying problems is the first step to making progress regarding safety. But we should take a deep breath (of oxygen, that poison). The world is a dangerous place, and the things that stop us from dying now may harm us later. These things should not be demonized but iterated on, improved, and eventually, only after a better technology arrives, replaced.

Malcolm Cochran, Digital Communications Manager

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