Class Discussion Question #1

Does the advancement of science and technology always spell good things for mankind? Or does each new improvement merely speed us further down the road to eventual oblivion? It's a debate that has fueled partisan literature on both sides, with the dystopian view seeming to triumph. The last "feel-good" science fiction movies came from the Star Wars franchise, and there technology played a villainous role (the Death Star and massive ships that the Empire used weren't exactly ringing endorsements of military firepower as a good thing).

In general, I feel like the good outweighs the bad, even if it's the bad that gets front-page news. From bad news, reforms can arise. But I can't fight off the sense of fear that is fueled by such novels as 1984 and Brave New World when it comes to the side effects of putting our faith in technology. The idea that science and technology would reduce the outbreak of war proved to be a pipe dream at least in the twentieth century, when men worked hard to devise new ways to kill one another with better technology. That is not progress.

But the question is, when has technology (and the science behind it) benefited mankind, and when has it harmed it? I think I'll try and go for the positive right off the bat.

Medicine in the previous centuries, while advancing from the days when leeches were stuck to a person to drain the "evil" from their blood, was still pretty unpleasant at the dawn of the 1900s. Anyone familiar with the Civil War-era style of surgery (drink a lot of whiskey and clamp down your teeth on a piece of cork while we saw through your leg to amputate it and pray that you don't lose any more blood) will be thankful that modern medicine is much more advanced than it once was. Here, science and technology really shine, because with the advances in each (either through lab tests or sheer accident) the care and maintainance of the human body became easier. Today, we can detect diseases that once might have been attributed to vicious spirits or the will of the gods. We can treat people for all kinds of ailments, whereas once they might have been turned away as "untouchables" for their disease. It's not as if we can rid the world of diseases altogether (diseases can adapt to new drugs, and immunities can be built which resist even the strongest antibiotics). But we can at least try to see what can be done.

Medicine may not always be the savior that we want it to be, however. AIDS, cancer, and other fatal diseases do not respect the advances made in medicine, and they take more lives each year than we can save. The race to cure cancer is one in which we might catch up to the lead runner, but we may never surpass. Research offers hope, however, and it's only through the trial-and-error method of testing drugs that we can hope to see such diseases, if not eradicated, at least lessened in their impact on future generations.

Now to the negative (but with a positive twist, perhaps): nuclear weapons.

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it seemed like the ultimate fulfillment of each nation's wish to eradicate the enemy once and for all. A weapon so massive, so awe-inspiring, and so terrifying, was simply an outgrowth of the growing arms race that began when the first caveman picked up a rock or a stick and hit a fellow caveman with it. For as long as there have been conflicts, there have been efforts to take out the other side with the best weapon. In the First World War, the Germans used gas, while both sides employed machine guns to turn Northern France into a slaughterhouse. Many of the innovations made in armaments were a direct effort to reduce the casualties on one side by inflicting a gross amount on the other. The A-bomb was the final word on how effective such weapons could be.

Its lethal nature alone made the A-bomb (and other derivations that followed, using more lethal doses of radioactive materials) a fearsome tool, but here's where I think a silver lining can be found in the mushroom cloud: the fear of such anihilation kept the superpowers from using it during the "Cold War." Consider how many times the United States and Russia almost came to blows, yet each backed off from using the one weapon that each possessed in abundance. Sure, smaller "proxy wars" were fought between them (in Korea, Vietnam, and various other outposts), but there was never a full-on nuclear strike by one nation against another. The cost of such a plan of action was unimaginable and it helped to keep each superpower from pressing the button, no matter how many times their fingers hovered over it.

But there is now the issue of terrorists possessing the bomb or some derivation of it. A terrifying outcome of the Cold War is this possibility, one that threatens to upset the precious balance that was established by the superpowers in the first place. And the radioactive nature of the material involved makes its disposal something that science has so far not managed to solve. Dumping the excess materials used in the manufacture of such weapons has not proven easy, considering their continuing danger to existing populations. When considering the good that has come from nuclear power, you shouldn't discount the potential harm that it can still pose even in a "contained" state.

Does the good outweigh the bad? I don't think that it always does, but in general science and technology have the potential to benefit mankind far more than they do to harm it. I just fear that the harm might prove more powerful than the good, in the long run.