Do you comprehend the importance of research and Science to humanity?

Yes. There is a woman at work that annoys the hell out of me. She is so trapped in her bubble, that she thinks people who want to learn anything are strange (she’s actually getting out of the navy to be a housewife, she married someone else of higher rank). I’ll be bored at work, reading stuff on that same website, Science Daily. She has to make some stupid comment like, “Why are you reading that?” or “You’re always on google looking up useless stuff”. She butted into a conversation I was having with someone else about how these scientists recently created a heart in a lab: “Ooooook…you guys are bored”.

Once I was kind of annoyed about something that came up at work and I muttered “Jesus fucking christ” under my breath and she gently punched me in the stomach and told me to watch my mouth…...I hate her….lol. She’s not even going to use her Montgomery GI Bill….the military is giving her free money to go to college and she’s not going to use it!

People like her are one of the reasons why I do care about science, progress, and its effects on humanity.

I think it is worth noting that the only guarantee that we move forward rather than constantly sliding backwards is the scientific method. When we abandon the rigors of research we open ourselves back up to the demon haunted world that Sagan warned us about.

Far too few people realize that human knowledge has not steadily advanced. Many speculate that if we had been able to continue with the discoveries of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians unimpeded by the barbarism of warring religions and tyrrants, we might have reached the moon in 1492 rather than just then realizing that there was a whole other side to the planet.

People have largely lost sight of this and they don’t realize that we could easily slip into a new dark age, retarding the growth of our collective knowledge for years, generations or even centuries. Too many people think, for example, that “creationists” and those who would try to trump science with faith are harmless. History has shown over and over again that this is not the case.

@crazyivan
Dear I say we agree and may God bless you.

Yup, without science, die age 30, probably of poor oral hygiene (assuming you are not killed by some trivial illness when you are a child) with science, live until you are 80 or older.

Without research, spend all day looking for fruits or animals to eat. with research, farm crops and feed millions.

I have a different perspective on the scientific method than most. Science is not about proving what is true. Science is about proving what is not true. Science rewards by demonstrating failure. When failure is accounted for and documented, then and only then, do truth propositions naturally emerge.

That’s the premise behind falsification and inference.

The ball doesn’t fall because of unicorns. It doesn’t fall because of will power. It doesn’t fall because of weather, or pressure, or luck, or magic. When science determines all the reasons why a ball doesn’t fall, then science infers the existence of an unseen force. We call that force gravity. But since we cannot touch, smell, taste, see or hear gravity, we must instead infer its existence.

To falsify the inference of gravity, all one need do is demonstrate another mechanism which accounts for the ball falling.

@realeyesrealizereallies Not to belabor your point with unnecessary nit-picking, but the theory would have to do a lot more than account for the dropping ball at this point. Gravity, as a predictive model, is so kick-ass that Newton already had the whole “putting a satelite into orbit” think figured out way before we got to space.

Not that any of this invalidates your point, but I think it is overly simplistic to simply say that science proves what is not true. The hallmark of a good scientific theory is it’s ability to make testable predictions. While all theories must be falsifiable to be scientific, that is not the sole qualification for a good scientific theory.

Agreed

@poisonedantidote regarding your comment

“Without research, spend all day looking for fruits or animals to eat. with research, farm crops and feed millions.”

Not quite. Not all day and actually not everyday either. Foraging peoples didn’t have to work all day, and actually had a good deal of down time. But yes, farming and herding work well too. We have yet to really advance in this field, in fact we have gone backwards for while.

Science research to the rescue? Yes, if we give them the money.

Yes, truth be told, farming and herding require a lot more work than hunting and gathering. Of course, you get to eat what you want as opposed to what nature gives you so there more advantages than disadvantages but we certainly didn’t earn any extra free time out of it.

Well, used to be the entire tribe was devoted to either hunt or gather. Now only a small portion of the tribe is devoted to farm. It frees the rest of us up to do other things, like build go carts and water slides, among other stuff, perhaps not so important.

Right, but the total number of man hours per calorie is higher with farming than hunting/gathering.

Is that why we’re overweight?

Actually people with a low caloric intake usually live longer, so with today’s science…

Without it Earth can’t accommodate 9 billion people.