Is science destroying the way we live?

Don't forget giving us cool gadgets, like cars, sandwich grills, and lava lamps!

And computers >.>

It's not the Science. It's the humans. We, are ruining our world. Science can be very useful, but if it falls to the wrong hands, then.. then what?
Science doesn't control itself..

It's not the Science. It's the humans. We, are ruining our world. Science can be very useful, but if it falls to the wrong hands, then.. then what?
Science doesn't control itself..

Did you know that many people that created an extremely lethal weapon did it because they felt it was so lethal that its presence would eradicate war? I am 100% with the inventor of the machine gun, which combined with obsolete military tactics to make WWI a complete bloodbath and pave the way for WWII (and every other bloodbath in our century.) While Albert Einstein wrote FDR and put the Manhattan Project in motion, he and the other scientists opposed its actual use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As for dynamite, (arguably the greatest innovation in military history,) Alfred Nobel created dynamite with the intent of helping civil needs such as construction, was absolutely appalled when he realized its military applications. In his remorse he created funds to celebrate peaceful achievemnts, hence every Nobel Prize ever given. However, gunpowder had been used for centuries peaceably by the Chinese.

If you chart human thought from ancient times to modern times, we ARE advancing in terms of collective conscience. There was a time when "great conquerors" were "great heroes," (Caesar, Genghis Khan, Alexander.) Closer to our times, their charisma and drive is acknowledged, but history views them as monsters, (Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon.) Humanity had a long stint in the 19th century without war, at the end of which they began to want "a little war" as a "diversion." That, along with the system of alliances set up by the Congress of Vienna, led to WWI.

A century later, at this point, civilized men no longer want war at all. While our world is filled with murder, factual democracies have a history of never fighting one another. Much as Britain might mock France, if someone in charge there advocated war between the two nations, heads would roll. So, it is a fairly legitimate conclusion that as more nations evolve to democracy, there will be less war, and if all nations should achieve democracy, there will be no war at all. I am not talking about "regime change" but national self-evolution such as through Magna Carta.

Humans are not perfect, but we are past living in caves, and there is a steadily growing consensus that we do not want to be bombed back to the Stone Age.

Me oh my, lots to cover here :S I'll do them separate:

1.Cloning:While it has it's value, at the same time it doesn't actually make anything truly useful. There's two main problems i have with it. First, what are we to draw from to clone? Can you find a perfect human? I don't see the point of making more human lives by a process that isn't ethically viable when you have 6 billion of them already. Secondly, the process would be so excessively expensive that you could feed a good number of already alive humans for a good number of years.

So ya, screw ethics, there's just no point whatsoever to cloning anyways. But I do like the prospect of stem cells.

Humans Killing Themselves Part:Science is supposed to be sustainable. A perpetual machine so to speak. What humans have created is shortcuts, little oversight of what certain pieces of technology would bring, and a general control that is in the hands of governments that whether they don't want war or not, they have the power to start it.

Civilization is not the answer to why wars stopped nor is democracy. Humans are meant by nature to destroy themselves and everything around them, or so we think, as we have for the longest time been the top predator. We are locusts upon the world as a whole, and science is a step towards ridding us of our destruction if only we'd listen to it. Instead we listen to supposed leaders to fix everything. Fix the government, fix science, fix your life. If science has proven anything, it's this:

For every one successful experiment, you'll have 100 failed ones. If you have no failures, well, your not a scientist, your a miracle worker.

It's not the Science. It's the humans. We, are ruining our world. Science can be very useful, but if it falls to the wrong hands, then.. then what?
Science doesn't control itself..

"Knowledge is Power."
And as most of you know, most humans are greedy for power so most scientific discovery are usually used for wars or evil purposes.. Science doesn't "destroy", but can alter the way we live or think.

i've had this thought in my mind for a while but i think it stemmed from when i read an Edgar Allan Poe a while ago

"To Science", or "Sonnet - To Science", is a traditional 14-line English sonnet which says that science is the enemy of the poet because it takes away the mysteries of the world. Poe was concerned with the recent influx of modern science and social science and how it potentially undermined spiritual beliefs.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Civilization is not the answer to why wars stopped nor is democracy. Humans are meant by nature to destroy themselves and everything around them, or so we think, as we have for the longest time been the top predator. We are locusts upon the world as a whole, and science is a step towards ridding us of our destruction if only we'd listen to it. Instead we listen to supposed leaders to fix everything. Fix the government, fix science, fix your life. If science has proven anything, it's this:

For every one successful experiment, you'll have 100 failed ones. If you have no failures, well, your not a scientist, your a miracle worker.

I am not a scientist so I can't contribute much more there. But I am a POLITICAL scientist, and I can ask how you came to these conclusions about government, when it IS true that democracies bicker and quarrel, but never go to war with one another. There is no modern counterexample to this; WWI was led largely by monarchs and caused the downfall of monarchies around Europe, WWII and Cold War were vs. totalitarian opponents, and the wars and anti-terrorism actions in the Middle East have been vs. 3rd World dictatorships. I think it is cause to hope that economic and verbal competition has replaced military action with countries that matter -- in the old days, if your leaders didn't like France, they'd send an army into it; but fairly recently American leaders renamed french fries into Freedom Fries, and after the stench died down, the two countries still have a fairly solid alliance. Mocking France is not the same as engaging in war with it that causes 300,000 deaths on both sides. As for countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia being backward and violent, that's not our fault, though admittedly it is very much our problem.

Yes, while it is true that there is no example of democracies going to war with each other, it's because it runs contrary to it's goal. The idea is to spread democracy as far as it can go through any means we can insert it into other countries, but there is indeed major problems with a world full of democracies. The main threat comes from the populus itself. There are riots. There are hackers. There is uprisings. For all the great wheeling and dealings that have brought a stop to "mass war" such as world wars, it's those wheeling and dealings that make the population angry.

The next is that democracy -needs- other governments to make it work. For the United States, they needs targets and all the China-made products they can load into their warehouses. There is so much confidence based on a communist country that supplies the US with over half of it's debt-load and nearly all it's products that it's weakened the markets that used to be the bread-and-butter jobs that used to be worth something.

You could say in fact, that it is not government that is causing our problems, it is corporations. Their oversights result in hazardous waste, loss of jobs due to outsourcing, and act as brand names simply to make the most amount of profit with the least amount of effort. Then they take that profit and hide it off-shore so they only have to pay 2% instead of corporate taxes.

And to me, if the French and the British finally had a war, it'd make more sense than any war started in the past 60 years.

If anything, we're destroying ourselves with our apathetic outlook on life.

no i think the more we know about it the better we understand..hobos destroy themselves ;p