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I hope you want to play another "What if" meme. I'll keep this post up til Friday.
So have at it!
I hope you want to play another "What if" meme. I'll keep this post up til Friday.
So have at it!
What if you realize that a new Dark Ages is about to descend and all knowledge as we know it will be wiped out and forgotten. What set of key scientific ideas would you want to preserve, ready to be discovered at the end of the Dark Ages, to get science going again.Put your answers in your comments to this post and I'll publish all of the ideas you propose. It should be interesting to see what ideas you forget to write down.
Try to keep your answers concise and specific.
Have fun!
Feel free to comment as often as you like!
Oh and I'll be thinking of a prize or prizes for the winners!
theteach
UPDATE: This "What If" meme will close at 4:00 PM EST today May 9. I will announce the best answer/comment tomorrow hopefully. Stay tuned! Thank you all for your participation. I love doing this. We'll do it again.
UPDATE: This "What If" meme will close at 4:00 PM EST today May 9. I will announce the best answer/comment tomorrow hopefully. Stay tuned! Thank you all for your participation. I love doing this. We'll do it again.
26 comments:
Pop rocks and soda will not blow up your stomach.
Mary thank you for your comments last week I just wanted you to see my peace globe.
I will be gone the rest of the due to some rewiring I have to get done. Have a good week my friend.
We must have moveable type and the printing press in order to disseminate knowledge and ideas. (I'm assuming the ability to read will remain intact!)
My first thoughts were for communicaitons and transportation. The computer and vehicles. Then I was thinking more about it and what really was important after the Dark Ages was health and just being clean. So sterilization, the importance of washing and not living in garbage and worse, would be ideas I'd add to the top of the list to save.
The Dark Ages does business as Charter Communications around here. So my thought is:
I'd want Internet technology back. All that blogging, all that good interaction between people. Best way to shake off the Dark!
Great question. My answer would have to be the exact (intuitive) science that enables human beings to gauge whom to trust entirely .....
Scientific? I want my anti-biotics! Oh and I posted the meme...Thanks for thinking of me. Have a great day, teach!
Penicillin, Penicillin, Penicillin and personal hygiene!
The battle of the "dark" ages was between earth based knowledge and the Christianity. That's why these ages are called "dark". They say that Arthur, St. Patrick's murder of millions of women healers (aka, snakes), and the Spanish Inquisition (>6 million women killed) that raised humanity from the "dark".
I'd like to regain what wisdom was available in these "dark" ages. We don't have any idea how people treated illness and disease. We don't even know how long people lived. They might have been happier, more fulfilled, and more blessed. We don't have any idea. None.
I 'spose if I have to choose, I'd choose antibiotics or regaining the knowledge of using bee propolis as antibiotic.
PJ is correct..moveable type to spread the word of the other scientific facts such as hygiene ... so many of todays diseases are resistant to antibiotics because they are doled out so often
Whatever we know in our own minds will remain after the Dark Ages dawn. But technology, of all sorts will be forgotten and how things work. PJ is right that we will certainly need printing technology but do we have to go back to the printing press? Probably not...
Antibiotics are a very good idea... and how to sterilize things, yes. But what about the computer?
You always have the most interesting posts!
The knowledge of how to produce electricity from steam, wind, and how to use sunlight for heating. I've thought about this for decades, we have nearly exhausted all the easy to access fossil fuels. What we use now requires the highest of high technology to produce. After a collapse of civilization, we would need to turn to more accessible and renewable energy sources with technologies that could lead us back.
Most of the other things folks mention (except for the printing press) require electricity for power (e.g. refrigeration for antibiotics).
Birth control, plain and simple.
Photography so that we could capture that history as it happened.
By the way, that last pic was a close up with my telephoto lens.
I use a Nikon D80 digital SLR camera with a 18-135mm lens. For those pics of the roses, I also used a Nikon SB600 flash and bounced it off the ceiling to eliminate any harsh shadow behind the subject. Glad you liked them.
Stop back by anytime.
You mean, no blogging???
Oh, I think I may have to wrap my head around that one... :)
I'm voting for INDOOR PLUMBING.
Oh Mo, I can't imagine no blogging... Okay, Okay let's say the Dark Ages come but they leave blogging intact. How's that? Ha!
Q: What if you realize that a new Dark Ages is about to descend and all knowledge as we know it will be wiped out and forgotten.
Ans: No answers from me. I would probably be checked into the mental asylum w/o internet access!! :P
p/s: Mary, did I ever mention, that your sidebar widgets displaying cameras often make me salivate all over my keyboard?!?!?!?
My first thought, as with others, was antibiotics. Oh, could we have satellites, too?
I'm so not a scientist. I thought about our knowledge of food production and the alternative energy methods, i.e., wind, sun, hydrogen. It would be nice not to repeat the mistakes we've already made and actually be ahead of the next disaster for a change.
Communication and computers would be nice, but they seem counterintuitive to a Dark Age. Unless they were secret and part of the underground resistance.
Hmm, this could be a science fiction novel! :)
This is a great thinking concept. You must be fun in the classroom.
Anthropology, Geology, Biology, Astronomy,mathematics,
I'd be totally happy without cell phones, electricity, or automobiles.
What if society developed using magnetic energy and not electromotive force or the confounded internal combustion engine.
Just a thought.
Rich
I guess we would all feel happy if we lived to tell ... then of course I would love to have the US Army survival bookguide :)
I would preserve the knowlege of how to forge metal. If I can do that I can make tools. Without tools nothing will ever be built.
It is not the key scientific ideas that I would want to preserve. I would preserve the history of how suppression of thought and creative ideas leads to ignorance, greed and misery.
I think maybe we ARE in the new Dark Ages... I guess I'd opt for some of the new-age ideas about energy healing (which are really ancient). I'd like to have computers and electric and cameras... Difficult question. I've never been good at choosing ONE thing.
hi, Happy Mother's Day
How completely fascinating. My first thought was for communication technology - and it seems most bloggers think of reaching out to others first. But stagnation and isolation are huge handicaps, and rejoining our far-flung planetary brothers and sisters would be important, I dare say.
On that note - tag! You're it! (By the way, I haven't forgotten your long-ago tag for the Make a Wish meme. It took me awhile to figure out how to work my graphics program. And I had some other memes parked that I had to get to. But your Make a Wish meme will be posted next Friday, on May 16th.)
Drat! I missed the cut off. But I did want to put in my 2 cents, adjusted for recession.
I think the most important thing to preserve would be writing, and the printing press.
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