Flush It Down
I watched Michio Kaku give a speech at a conference. He was talking about technology and how cheap and easy things are getting to make. He talked about how we will someday in the not so distant future have technology as thin as a sheet of paper, that will have all the workings of some of our most advanced technology of today, but that we will just basically throw away like it’s actually a sheet of paper.
He went on to talk about how our toilets will someday collect information on the waste that our bodies produce, eventually getting to a point where we can detect cancer. I got back from the conference and was over at some friend’s house making some dinner and I was talking to a girl I was dating at the time. I was telling her about the conference, what Kaku was talking about and eventually explained the toilets. Her reply was unbelievable.
She said, “That’s freaking stupid. Cancer won’t be able to be detected from your waste by a toilet.” I was like, “so you don’t think that in another 50 years, with the rate that technology is progressing, that we won’t have toilets that will be able to tell us if we have cancer cells in our bodies?” She told me that if I believed that, that I was a stupid person.
And went on further to clarify that I was not just being ignorant in this situation, but that I was a stupid person, incapable of intelligent thought. I don’t get set off by much. But this led to a screaming match over the phone that ended with me hanging up my phone. My humiliation didn’t end there. I then remembered that I’m standing in my friend’s kitchen, with him and his wife staring at me from the living room, me fuming, and holding a wooden spoon in my hand.
I just looked at them and said, “She wouldn’t believe that toilets will be able to detect cancer.”