What are the reasons behind the current status of science, technology, and society today based on what happened in the past? Explain and justify.
There are a lot of things that happened in the past that might be connected to the current status of science, technology, and society. As they have said, “life can only be understood; but it, must be lived forwards.” Looking back on the past will make us understand the current status of our life. There are some reasons of how the science, technology and society change over time.
Firstly, the inventions and discoveries, because of new discoveries and things invented by different scientists, the society is slowly improving through the help of science. During the early age, the development of the society is based on science since the knowledge of the people in the past were limited unlike today where the tech-geeks are continuously growing. The fire discovery led to new inventions and serves as the beginning of what we are and what we have now.
Second on the list is technology adoption. The development of the people’s curiosity led to new inventions where the technology is gradually growing. As stated on the book The Beginnings of Technology and Man, “The growing range and complexity of man's tools ran parallel to the development of his activities and achievements in other respects. Archaeological data show that he had now fully become Homo sapiens, Man the Thinker.” This is one of the proofs that science, particularly the people’s mind and discoveries are contributing to a development of the technology that creates a domino effect to start the modern era.
Lastly, the intellectual capacity of human. In the beginning, humans are like an animal where the knowledge is almost empty, however, due to their discoveries and intellectual capacity, the limited knowledge grows as well as the society. They continued to study science and depend their daily living on it, as the science grows, the technology and society grows as well. The curiosity of the human mind creates a wonderful and significant thing in our society.
In contrast, the advancement of technology could also create a chaos on our society. Currently, we are suffering on pandemic caused by a deadly unseen virus called Corona Virus Disease also known as Covid-19. I believe that this pandemic is the result of human curiosity where there’s a lot of conspiracy theories such as this virus originated from eating animals specifically bats. However, there is still no evidence about this. Another one is that this virus was made from a laboratory for biological attack purposes. Nevertheless, none of these theories was proven scientifically and the scientist are expanding their knowledge to fight against this virus.
In conclusion, it is undeniably true that the science, technology and society is continuously growing with the help of what happened on the past. Historical events were important to support the arguments about the things that currently happening, thus, studying about them will bring a huge contribution on science. In fact, they were giving facts and serve as evidence on what is happening on the current events.
Sources:
J.D. Bernal, Science in History, Chapter 4, Vol. 1 (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1971) pp. 145-237.
R.J. Forbes, "Mesopotamian and Egyptian Technology" in Melvin
Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (eds.), Technology in Western C ivilization, Vol. I (Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 1967), Chapter 3, pp. 26-47.
R.J. Forbes, "The Beginnings of Technology and Man" in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr.(eds.), Technology in Western Civilization, Vol I (Oxford University Press: New York, 1967) Chapter 2, pp. 11-26. White Jr. L. TECHNOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE AGES In Melvin Kranzberg
and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. (eds.) Technology in Western Civilization, Vol. I (Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 1967), Chapter 5, pp.66-79
Published: September 18, 2021
