Coronavirus on a beam balance

Some years ago I was visiting an exhibition in Pisa (Italy) about History of advertisement. There I saw for the first time the below poster by Radior, a London based company that started in 1917 marketing cosmetics containing Radium.

When Pierre and Marie Curie discovered Radium in 1898, the world was on the top of the industrial revolution and science was the cause of that bright achievement. Everything coming from science and technology was positive news, no one could even think about possible drawbacks. People where happy to buy radioactive cosmetics, “it can energize my skin!” could be one of their thought, I suppose.

Later on, during 20^th century unfolding, things have changed. People started to understand that technology positive achievements brings negative collateral effects with them, as Marie Curie experienced later on her investigation or as climate change showed clearly. But technology development did go on, and growth did not stop. If we put metaphorically negative and positive effects of technology on a beam balance, the deviation was still on the positive side.

Then Coronavirus (COVID-19) arrived, I don’t want to go through pandemic events but just to remind that the “nothing will ever be the same again” adagio reappeared, as in all occasion when history is making. Among many viral video circulating these days on social media, the interview of Luc Montagnier looks confirming that technology public  acceptance is on an historical turning point. Professor Montagnier supposes that 5G waves (Wuhan is one of the cities with more 5G antennas in the world) could have modified a harmless Coronavirus into the more dangerous Coronavirus. Of course I don't agree with this theory, but this thesis and its scientific accuracy is not the matter of this post. The point is that if those ideas go viral to common people it is because some of them consider them potentially true. Finally, the discrediting trend of technology comes full circle, the beam balance is definitely in the negative side if people feel that 5G could be the cause of the pandemic.

If this is the case, that’s a really new historical paradigm. People of the future could think: “why should we make effort to develop a new technology (or build a new factory) if this is creating more troubles than solutions?”.