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Stephen Hawking Asks The Internet a Question
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Stephen Hawking received about 15000 answers to a question he posted 2 days ago on Yahoo Answers. His question was 'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'." I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.' How would you answer Dr. Hawking's question?
that answer is so arrogant I don't know where to start
I'm sorry - mod me into the ground, but this question is just childish.
Nuke all arabs immediately.
This assumes that science is not a religion. In many ways, for many people, it is. To ban religion would be to ban science, and to some extent mathematics.
Any so-called science which cannot be performed as an experiment under controlled conditions and recreated according to the notes from those experiements is more blind faith than anything proven. Therefore, it is not science in the truest form of the word. Speculative mathematics, any of the social sciences, economics, and medicine require some amount of faith in something you cannot fully understand and cannot fully control. The mystery is greater than the answers, and the mystery seems to grow as more questions are answered. How is that different from religion?
Religion and science are two branches of the same tree. That tree is philosophy, and imperfect human thought is the strongest root. As long as philosophies exist, those philosphies will be partly religious and partly scientific. One cannot remove a branch and change the nature of the tree.
Communism has killed over 100 million in the last 100 years alone. Religion doesn't even begin to come close.
"The group can only move forward with consensus when that person does so. So in a group, you're not at the mercy of the top of curve so much as at the mercy of those at the bottom. Here in the US, Bush's appeal is somewhat an indication of this."
Based on this, dosent the possibility exist that you are the slowest person in the crowd and you cannot understand what is going on?
I dont say this to flame, but what I mean is that with political situations you never can tell the results of things until they are over. Sometimes the results take decades to understand.
In retrospect FDR was one of the greatest traitors and failed leaders in American (or maybe even world) history. You have no farther to look than his unpreparedness and lack of effort in the treaty of versailles negotiations. Similarly, Jimmy Carter did more to create problems with communism in South America than he did to solve it, not to mention creating problems in the Middle East. Reagan "ended the cold war" but the full results are not known as yet because of the state of flux in Russia so the jury is still out on his decisions there.
I know it is easy to look at the current situation and dictate that it is now going and will end badly. However the implicit lack of foresight in humanity puts almost all of us in the same bucket when it comes to understanding what will happen.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.