Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Section 2 of Armageddon and Science

The question deals with the following:
Does the enhancement and advancement of humanity speed up the doomsday clock?

I can only answer with a depends. The advancement of humanity can give us tools to wipe each other out, to wipe out life on earth.  Our advancement may get us to depend too much on technology, so much so that when an EMP like phenomena occurs, we become hopeless, losing our ability to adapt.

I feel that the advancement may have delayed the doomsday clock for humanity. Technology wiped out smallpox. Yes diseases could come by and ravage our populace but we can develop ways to a artificially combat it, healthy immune systems work well. Being able to have humans with the ability to be immune to such diseases would prolong our doomsday clock, although the humans would need the immunities in their body, therefore the diseases would still exist..we would not be affected by them.
     Yes our technology harms the environment, but it did so back in the middle ages as well with massive geographical alterations and destruction of natural habitats, along with heavy deforestation. Having said that, technology can change that. Look  t the newer forms of energy, solar, wind, clean coal, nuclear, LHC (if done right), artificial photosynthesis (would be huge if it works) etc.  IF solar and wind become more efficient, we learn how to reuse and store and make safer the nuclear power, and get the LHC and photosynthesis to work our technology would become "greener."

Lastly, and this gets even more sci-fi, our advancement into space can delay the human doomsday clock. If we are to colonize worlds light years away, but through means that are FTL or CTL, when this planet gets wiped out by an asteroid or the sun exploding, humanity would still exist far out in the stars. yes I am aware that humanity will probably eb wiped out by the time the sun blows up, or is wiped out by a rapped race of teddy bear aliens, but still, expanding past our solar system increases the likelihood of longer human survival.

1 comment:

  1. Craig, I am delighted by the way you think. Your contributions to the course have been awesome! You might enjoy the book "The Demon in the Freezer" by Richard Preston - nonfiction story of USAMRID, smallpox, biological weapons in general. I couldn't put it down!
    http://richardpreston.net/books/df.html

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