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It is a complicated matter... as long a science advances and is accesible to all, we all gain more power. That enables everybody to be dangerous. I can go anywhere in the world, access a huge amount of information, purchase and have sent home lots of things very cheaply, etc. We crave power, both in the sense of ability and energy, and it seems to grow monotonically (Freeman Dyson proposed searching for efficient star-energy-capturing devices as a way to find ET life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere). But I agree, it seems that it is not very easy to prevent new science to be discovered. We are a curious species, and even if we go back to the dark ages, even if we move up or down the knowledge scale randomly, this brownian movement will end up jumping too high, and giving too much power to someone. So at least we should incorporate an element of respect to such power in our education, our ethics, and try to prevent it from being lost. In my opinion, this kind of thing is most efficiently managed through religion, but current religions do not advance very quickly nor are amenable to "improvements", whereas the idea of scientific religion, to us, now, seems abhorrent and oxymoronic. I believe this might change in the future, though. If science "just works" (and it is indistinguishable from magic), I could picture someone stripping out the "scientific inquiry and skepticism" part, and building a religion on top of the huge building of true scientific facts that we faithfully take for granted. So in my opinion we have to focus on education. Sorry for the rambling :) |