Science: Boon or Bane?

First of all I am going to assume that boon is in the yes column.

Science is fundamentally neutral – whether it is good or bad is dependent upon the people creating it and ultimately using it. The vast majority of science is done for science’s sake, for the ‘advancement’ of humanity and therefore on the whole can be thought of as good. Yes there are bad things that come out of science – take for example nuclear weapons which are something that is pretty obviously on the bane side of this debate but these weapons in and off themselves are not particularly bad (I guess pretty much balance out – boon of employment vs bane of using some resources pointlessly + worry of some nuclear waste) rather it is the use of them that is particularly bad. And of course most other science would not have the same problems on the bane column.

If not for the field of medical science, we might still face calamitous diseases like the black plague that ravaged Europe before it continued on a destructive path to Russia. At the time, the Black Plague killed around 450 million people, which historians estimate was between 30 to 60 percent of the population in Europe at the time. Nowadays, science has addressed these issues with isolating the infected and better knowledge of how diseases work, which became possible through medical science and learning about the problem. Antibiotics, knowledge won through scientific discovery, is a stable chemical compound that remains within the human body for a long time. It has helped millions of people to stay healthy. For the time being, antibiotics like penicillin has saved as many as 80,000,000 lives.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, science will continue to advance well into the future. One of its more interesting discoveries has been the possible use of bacteria to help clean up oceanic oil spills like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Science has engineered a form of hydrocarbon bacteria and microbes that feed off the polluted parts of the ocean, called Alcanivorax borkumensis. These microbes are available even now, but unfortunately, science has not yet reached a point where they are effective. Still, it could be a huge advantage in the future.

In the past, most people in the western hemisphere viewed countries of the East as more exotic. With the advances in technology made from science, we can now sit at home in Arkansas and communicate 7,414 miles to a long-time friend in China. All this happens without either party ever leaving their home in a matter of seconds. In that sense, you can make friends all across the globe, and you never even have to leave your home to do it. That’s the type of luxury that not even the great kings of the Medieval era had. This global communication also makes it much easier for families to speak with each other when they go abroad. For example, a mother’s son may choose to serve in the military, and nowadays, instead of having to write letters home, they can do a video chat over Skype, and it’s like they never left.

Because of the systems we have implemented today, drought and famine have a slightly less devastating impact. Through scientific knowledge, we have learned how to deal with drought and famine. For example, when California experienced a drought in 2014, we simply shipped over $110 million in supplies to that region from areas not experiencing the drought. The scientific ideas that we became aware of as we learned about resource management has helped us to deal with these hard times better. We have a kingly selection of food choices that were unheard of in the past. The royalty of the past could not even dream of some of the convenience we have today. For example, we can live in the cold climate of Alberta, Canada, and have mangos, a fruit that does not grow there, shipped from countries like Nicaragua and Mexico, and because of food preservative knowledge obtained through science, we can taste these foods. In the past, they may have rotted on the voyage to such a far-off destination.

There’s a funny joke that goes, “People of today have all the knowledge they could ever dream of, yet if they spoke to someone from the past on how their smartphones work, most wouldn’t give that description. Instead, they tell them how they use it to look at cat pictures.” That joke highlights the reality of today. With a simple search on Google, we have all the knowledge we could ever need in a lifetime. That leaves us with plenty of opportunity to become some of the most educated people in the world if we use it correctly. Learn how Google grew from a successful scientific project at Stanford.