Re: Question about IQ 166

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 04:04:00 GMT, Phyllis Steen wrote:

I suspect that time has cured me of much of the idealism you suffer,
Hans-George. Or maybe I'm simply jaded. But name one thing, just one
single thing, that man has created that has not resulted in more harm than
good.

Phyllis,

first thing that comes to my mind is my dishwasher. (:-) I
honestly believe that a society, in which most households have
dishwashers will produce very few, if any, terrorists.

Religion? It's is the basis of more wars than any other thing.

On this one I totally agree with you.

Nuclear energy? Nuclear power plants are the most wasteful, stupid, Rube
Goldberg invention ever brought forth on this planet, yet humankind, for the
most part, turns its back on wind power and solar energy.

I suspect you fell for green propaganda. I think you're very
misguided on this topic, and I suspect you fell for more similar
green stuff.

An interesting book to read, concerning nuclear powerplants as
well as DDT and other substances, is, "Trashing the Planet" by
Dixy Lee Ray, who happens to have been governor of Washington
state and, more importantly, chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission, assistant secretary of state in the U.S. Bureau of
Oceans, and a longtime member of the zoology faculty of the
University of Washington, not to mention that she was awarded
the United Nations Peace Prize, among several other awards and
honors. I mention this only so you don't take the book too
lightly. This person knows much better than any of us here what
she's writing about.

Greater living through chemistry? Sometimes. But take DDT.

Read the book!

And then there is what is done with the gift. As I look around me at the
damage we (humankind) have done to this planet in my lifetime, I'm not so
sure I want to give anything to the world that the world is so bent on
misusing. I cannot go to the California forests of my childhood because
they have been killed by pollution. I cannot walk the beaches and visit the
tidepools I took my children to when they were in elementary school because
"we" have damned every river on the Pacific Coast, completely blocking sand
going naturally into the ocean, and as a consequence there is massive
erosion that has lost the beaches, rerouted ocean currents, and killed the
coral that was native to the shores of Southern California when I was young.
I no longer live in California. My Calofornia is no longer there.

I appreciate your concern about our environment, but don't see
things too bleakly. The biggest German river, the Rhine, was
once devoid of fish due to pollution. Today it is alive and
well, and even salmon have begun to migrate upstream again.

We certainly have problems with environmental destruction, but
they are not unsolvable. Meanwhile life expectancy has grown
sharply all over the planet. Even in a country as wretched and
ravaged by civil war as Angola, life expectancy has doubled
since 1900.

I see no reason to despair entirely. There are big problems, but
we are already about to solve some of them. Just don't fall prey
to the media, which publish so many lies, typically in the form
of media scares, that it has become a bit difficult to find the
truth.

I don't know how old you are, but perhaps you remember the 60s,
in which the big media scare was the coming ice age, and the
articles are very similar to todays'.

Lighten up and see the good things too. (:-)

Hans-Georg

--
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.

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