Leaderboard

We have a lot of technology that we use where we don’t understand why it works - we just know that it does. I’m pretty sure they had e.g. siphons back in the day, before anyone understood air pressure. We don’t notice the ~1 atm of pressure on us, after all. People had barometers and noticed the correlation with the weather without understanding the details. They had evaporative cooling structures in ancient times without knowing exactly how they worked. They just knew that wind passing by something wet cooled the air.

The most basic equation of gravity does not require any significant knowledge, except the ability to think, measure and calculate. i.e., drop an object from a height d and measure the time it spent flying toward the ground. You get a few samples and derive the equation d=1/2 a t^2. The problem with people is that 1) there was no free public education for all people until the end of the 19th century 2) only a fraction of rich aristocrats (later also rich townsfolks) (a few who could read, write and count) were interested in science. Because of this, for centuries and millennia, there was slow development because they were more interested in their daily lives, and increase of their personal assets, not in the development of science. Nowadays, too, only a small fraction of the population is engaged in science. But because the population is huge, there is the largest absolute number of scientists in the world.

! Moderator Note While the human population certainly has an impact on the environment, most solutions are political in nature. Moved. Born in the US. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Eyes_Cody

You probably don't think of YOU as an eternal soul. I don't think of that physical terminal body wrapped around my natural eternal soul as ME. The SOUL is ME. Some man met some woman to fabricate a temporary body for my soul in 1963 according to what I believe. To reject all notions of possible life hereafter is about as naive as to reject all possibilties of intelligent life beyond planet Earth. I see Man as a member of the animal kingdom. I think of Homo sapiens sapiens as being three subspecies: Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid. This has to do with skin/hair/eye pigment, hair textures, skull shapes and facial features. Comparing white people, black people and yellow/red/brown people is about like comparing bulldogs, German shepherds, chihuahuas and American foxhounds.