Look at your life, right now. Given everything, would you trade it for a life in a cave as a hunter-gatherer? Would you rather go back to life under Caesar?
“Science” is neither a blessing, nor a curse. “Science” is just a name given to a particular branch of human progress and philosophy. To think, to try and make things better, and, as the saying goes, to err, is human. As human beings, we fall forwards through life, fixing one problem and creating a new one as we do so. With each little stumble, we gradually get a little bit better. The solution to the problems we cause ourselves is not to go backwards and abandon all the progress we’ve made, but to keep on trying to solve the new problems. Otherwise we’ll just have to do it all over again.
But almost every innvoation we’ve made has more benfits than downsides. The benfits of motorized transportation far out way the side effects of air pollution, at least IMHO. Same thing with cures for diseases doing much more good for humanity than our ability to make bio-weapons has done bad. We are better off than we were a thousand or ten thousand years ago, that is the proof that advances in technology outweigh their downsides.
If all we’re doing is going around in circles, then I’m assuming you’d have no problems dropping all the technological benefits you enjoy, logging off the internet right now and going and living in a cave.
If you want to live in primitive superstition, be my guest, but if you want to make incorrect statements about science (strictly speaking, you’re bitching about technology, not science) I certainly hope you’ll be challenged.
Science doesn’t “give” anybody anything. Science is just a method of applying logic and reason to a problem. Would we be better off without logic? I expect not.
The OP is talking like someone who thinks science equals black magic. Only the Pit would offer me an opportunity to respond fully to such a thread.
nonsense Bryan, science is what it is, I pointed out very specific fallacies within its realm. Quite simply I’m saying it perhaps causes just as many problems as it solves, and even thoguh its probably a necessary evil, there are plenty of societies that place far less emphasive on science & technology yet are perfectly sophisticated & productive.
Are hammers a blessing or a curse? - the very same tool that so readily drives nails into wood can slip and crush your thumb, or fall on your toe, or be used to destroy priceless works of art, or smash someone’s skull.
I’m happy in my relationship.
but I have to put up with sharing a bathroom.
I get great sex whenever I want it.
But it’ll never be with Sean Connery.
I always have emotional support and affection.
But sometimes I’m called on to give support when I’d rather be reading the SDMB.
Therefore, all relationships are moot: with every advantage there is some sort of disadvantage, and so there is no point int bothering at all.
You see what I am doing, what you did? You are making the implicity claim that these things you listed are propotionate to each other and that they are a complete list of the pros in cons, and you have presented no evidence to back up those claims. It’s not an arguement, it’s a handful of observations with no clear cut relationship to each other.
Furthermore, , have you ever had a serious tooth abcess? Urinary tract infection? Ear infection? Kidney stone?
As horrifically painful as these things are today, they used to go one and on until they killed people. We find skulls with huge holes in the jaw because an abscess ate and ate and ate away the bone until finally (presumably) the infection spread to the bloodstream and the poor person died. Can you imagene watching your child die like that?
And on a day-to-day level, I’m willing to trade anxiety over bio-weapons for having hot water on tap, and fresh food whenever i want it.