| Sure. First, I want to make it clear that I am a technophile: I really like technology. I'm also really grateful for the benefits of modern technology. I'm also a Nature-lover, but I don't think that technology is necessarily antithetical to healthy ecology. (For example, I am pro-nuclear-power.) With that out of the way... Here's a thought experiment. Humans lived for a few million years before developing agriculture and villages starting about ten to fourteen thousand years ago. I'm not an anthropologist, but I think we would be safe to assume that the causes of death during the first period were "natural": disease, predators, fighting, famine... have I missed any? We can then call the causes of death arising after the advent of agriculture "technological" and add up all the deaths so far from each category and see which number is bigger. I would reckon the "natural" deaths would be outstripped by the "technological" deaths by a wide margin, with the tipping point sometime in the last few thousand years. I'm counting wars on the technology side (pretty much since the invention of the atlatl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlatl ) But this feels like sophistry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat... So, heart disease, infectious and parasitic diseases, cancer, ... Er, um, I think I have to "roll back" my comment... I was thinking of car accidents, pollution, and the general ecological problems that have developed as unintended consequences of our technology. (We're victims of our own success.) (There is also the "medical care is the third leading cause of death in America" issue already mentioned by jmulho, which should be a much bigger deal than it is: side-effects and out-right errors kill over 100,000 people in the US a year!) But really, it's the time-scale that matters: if the ecology tanks and takes us with it then our technology (in hindsight) really is (was) the existential threat, despite the good run we had. |