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Nifty3929 | on: Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
underlipton | parent | next
Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is to extend the capability of the human body, it's natural to implicitly and primarily consider what that extended capability can do to another human body.

It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.

grogenaut | root | parent | next
Dynamite is ~20-60% nitro glycerine and the rest "dope" aka a stabilizer which could be sawdust for instance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite].

If you have heart issues, you're likely taking nitro daily for chest pain.

So saying it's bad is 40% wrong at least. Makes ya think.

underlipton | root | parent
You don't get to unbundle the technology that was achieved by bundling and call it okay because the components are benign.

The best you can say is that dynamite was a safer alternative to preceding technology, and that its danger only comes under certain circumstances. None of that takes away from the fact that dynamite is quite dangerous when those circumstances arise, which is why it's commonly (and correctly) viewed as such.

But also, going back to the original contention - whether dynamite was neutral or positive for humanity - the destruction it and its descendants wrought in war is maybe more than counterbalanced by advancements in infrastructure. That said, if the industrialization and globalization it enabled leads to biosphere-destroying climate change, I would lean towards neutral.

usrnm | root | parent
Now think what ingesting a smartphone would do to your body. That's a very silly metric
underlipton | root | parent
I didn't say anything about ingesting.
oblio | parent
Has is been a net positive?
RugnirViking | root | parent | next
there are a bunch of ways to look at this (dynamite as a specific kind of explosive, dynamite as a stand in for explosives in general, dynamite in the context of what else we would use for similar purposes if dynamite specifically wasn't invented)

and most of them come out on top. It's main innovation is that its a more stable explosive, much safer to use. Without it, I think a lot more people would have died in mining and construction accidents. It's not typically the kind of thing used for warfare, but im sure it has been for some (but would they just use something else?)

solenoid0937 | root | parent
certainly, it has enabled the buildout of cities and infrastructure that were previously impossible to build.