As a professional historian, I completely agree with Catholic90. The idea that the earth was some kind of utopia that was incapable of catastrophic damage before modern science is just false. Many of the tools that we’ve had since the beginning of time have had unimaginably devastating consequences. Even something as simple as the “scientific” discovery of fire has caused millions of deaths globally, but of course has also caused great good. The fire of Rome killed hundreds of thousands of people, and left almost 900,000 homeless. Slash and burn agriculture around the Yellow River in China almost 5,000 years ago caused such erosion, that the river silted up and devastating floods now occur on average twice a decade. Five thousand years later, three of those floods in the twentieth century killed 300,000 people or more! To this day, the river is so full of silt that there is almost no life in the river.
Of course, the scientific discovery of the domestication of animals helped end our nomadic existence. However, horses were turned into cavalries, and untold millions died in battle. Does that mean that the discovery of horse breeding has doomed our species?
The load-bearing properties of the arch was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the Romans. With it, aqueducts were constructed that could bring water to millions of people. They also used it to construct the Colosseum of Rome, where tens of thousands died in the arena. Is the arch responsible for those deaths, or was it the decisions of people?
The science of ship building allowed the Spanish and Portuguese to explore the world. New lands were discovered, new foods and animals were brought to Europe, and the life expectancy of Europeans rose by almost ten years overnight just due to better nutrition. However, within one hundred years of the discovery of America, 90% of all Native Americans were dead from European diseases that they had no immunity to. Even worse, the Caribbean remains the only region of the world in which an entire race of humans became extinct. The last Carib, Taino, and Arawak Indians in the Caribbean were dead by 1600.
modern science began when our tools became powerful enough to cause mass-destruction to life on earth
tools we never had before, which, like any tools, would be misused, but to much greater effect
Well, the very first tools man ever made, which were hunting tools constructed from stone, bone, and wood, managed to cause the extinction of a large number of species, so I guess that the “evil” of science dates back to our very origins.
Do you consider yourself a Luddite?
