Scientific Progress

The world is abuzz with claims of artificial life by Craig Venter. People are marveling, rightly so, at the capabilities of the human mind that makes this possible. Many say that such research will go a long way in alleviating many forms of human suffering (poverty, feeding the starving millions etc). I beg to differ.

This idea of invoking the technology fairy to come and somehow deliver us out of our miserable lives is an idea thats been around for a long time now. It has had its share and its time we realize our mistake in believing in fairies. We humans, have pretty much no natural predators (except in the rare circumstance of we getting one on one with a wild beast) and have learnt to survive nay prosper in all forms of climatic conditions. So, ideally we should have the best possible scenario on planet earth for the prospering of human civilization. Sadly, the case is far from it, as is evidenced by all the violence around us. The reason for all this have always been blamed on external structures - religious, social, political or economic structures. Sadly, all of them have failed at different points. The only common factor to all of them is the individual and his sickness. So, simply the problem should be the individual and not any structures he has created. Instead of seeing this simple truth for ourselves, we constantly go with herd in trying to change communism to capitalism, this technology to that technology etc.

I believe, all technology that is needed for a healthy and happy human society was probably invented two thousand years ago. Not to say technology that was invented after that point do not have their uses. But, their use is necessitated by the psychological sickness of the human species and hence they do not have an existence of its own. Most human individuals, cannot be happy with 'what is'. Its always the future or the past that matters. Their memories so haunt them that even years later, they derive their sense of being from the past. Unless this psychological sickness is completely and totally cured, there is no way out for the human society. This means recognizing all the nonsense we do in our day to day lives and see the absolute absence of necessity of most of that.

When there is a mad man in town who goes around hurting people, it is not sufficient to simply try and produce measures to prevent the mad man from hurting others. Curing the insanity is of primal importance. So, the only way to progress towards curing the violence around us is to cure the human individuals of this psychological sickness, which means starting with us and with people around us and freeing ourselves of unnecessary psychological luggage. Until then, science will remain only a form of entertainment for some sections of the population (like how religion is a form of entertainment for some other sections). Nothing wrong in entertainment but claims of scientific progress alleviating human suffering falls short of the truth!