Monday, January 5, 2009

What Will Change Everything?

From EDGE DOT ORG comes the year's "big" question:

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

All the brilliant, clever, thoughtful answers from the world's thinkers are here. But posing the question contained this observation:
Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news. And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.
For the Philippines, we could well ask the same question.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE EVERYTHING?

4 comments:

rhaj said...

"the beings not seeing clearly had an advantage over those who saw everything in 'flux'"---F. Nietzsche

happy new year!
or
"hapi nw yr!"---chat window style

Anonymous said...

We, the consumers, voted. Our governments, our politicians always play catch up? This is true, bcoz, much like the police they are reactive not pro-active. And that is how it will be.

Onotheo said...

I recently discovered the site. You know if a site is significant when people blogs about it. I myself did and made my own answer.
Happy new year!

Jego said...

"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

I expect the Dawkinsian 'selfish gene' theory to be completely discredited. During the 'Darwin Wars' evidence clearly favored Gould, but Dawkins had the more 'media-friendly' story, and Cambridge-prof accent prolly didnt hurt either. In short, he won the PR war. But the Dawk is retiring, and evidence continues to pile up against his theory -- even Lamarckian processes seem to be in play. It's holding on merely on the strength of its propaganda.