Technology

Tonee

<div class="IPBDescription">medicine</div> When you where dunked in the water because you were doing "witchcraft" how far in medicine technology do you think we'd be if that all never happened... I'm sure we would of found lots more vaccines and more ways to cure cancer by now

Just wondering what yous think, probably not worth posting about but who cares <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->

Legat

I would rather like to know how far we'd been if Archimedes had not been killed by an impatient Roman legionaire, and even more if the Great Library of Alexandria had not been lost ...

Da Vinci failed at recreating some inventions the greeks had made 1700 years before....

Lt_Patch

Sorry to stamp on an idea, but I always thought that the drowning of a witch was an attempt by an overzealous religion to purge the world of any non-believers/people who you didn't agree with/people who did anything not "normal".

*edited out (must remember to not be abstract on the Discussion forum...)*

Legat

<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->In a way, (a very abstract, and bored way) we could say that Christianity (or a varient thereof) has in fact, influenced one of the (arguably) most evil men in history...
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I serously doubt that claim.
Also, Hitlers viewpoint was not so unnatural at the time he expressed it to the public is his pamphlete "Mein Kampf".

I don't want to disturb you, but antisemitism was neither unknown at that time, nor uncommon. It was there throughout history. When Absinth was banned in France, populists proclaimed that Absinth was a drug invented by Jews to weaken the peoples resolve....
The infamous "Ripper" chase resulted in wild speculation about murderous jewish sects that conspire against the empire...

Also, "euthanesia" for children born with genetical anomalies was common and and widely accepted. Disabled persons were considered harmful to society, as they weaken them indirectly. That was not an idea Hitler came up with first... If anything influenced Hitler, than it was a sick period of history, full of warmongering and battered by economic turmoil and poverty.

Back to Topic please.

CMEast

To turn this more fully into a discussion people might be able to get their teeth in to, what about the idea that certain ideas just have their time to arrive. That it isn't the person who invents rather than the age and that the inventor is just one among many that could have done the same thing.

I'm not sure if that idea was true in the beginning when the human population was smaller and when we didn't have so much knowledge all ready but nowadays? At some point we will give out a nobel peace prize for the cancer cure but I'm pretty sure if it wasn't discovered by that person it would have been discovered by another a few months or a year down the line.

Any thoughts?

othell

I'm still trying to figure out what witchcraft has to do with cures for cancer...

Sky

<!--QuoteBegin-Lt Patch+Apr 19 2005, 04:00 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Lt Patch @ Apr 19 2005, 04:00 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Sorry to stamp on an idea, but I always thought that the drowning of a witch was an attempt by an overzealous religion to purge the world of any non-believers/people who you didn't agree with/people who did anything not "normal". <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually, the burning/drowning/hanging/stoning of witches in America was most directly caused by social conflicts between different communities, different families with adjacent farms (and subsequent border conflicts), things of that nature. Religion was just used as an aid to prove the accused witch a heretic, because a truly religious person couldn't be a witch by definition.

And as for what witches and cures for cancer have in common: the original topic was a very specific look at "How advanced would our medicinal technologies be today if society never tried to cure illnesses and/or wayward individuals with deadly techniques." CMEast wants to expand this topic to the much broader, "Do inventions arise because of the people who think of them or the circumstances of the time."

Such techniques would have been impossible to develop without previous advances in technology. This is how all science works; the invention of the radio would have been impossible without the discovery of electricity. So, even if a doctor went back in time with a sample of a smallpox vaccine, he wouldn't be able to protect all of the native Americans from the disease. As such, our understanding of medicine and the like could not have been any more advanced than it was during the time of the Inquisition and other witch hunts.

And I'd be more inclined to agree that inventions are more products of the time and setting than the individual person who comes up with them. Alexander Graham Bell gets credit for inventing the telephone, however he only filed the patent an hour before a competitor. If he hadn't done it, someone else would have.