quora answers3

Actually, and somewhat counterintuitively, people really lived better in paleolithic times, pre-civilization, than they did in early civilizations. In the sense that they lived quite a bit longer, anyway. While average life expectancies in paleolithic times are estimated by historians to have been well into the thirties, average Roman Empire life expectancy was only 25. Now, what’s particularly counter-intuitive about this is that fertility rates — human population — certainly rose a great deal as a result of civilization. I think this apparent paradox of lower life expectancy with higher fertility is explained by the fact that while the paleolithic people actually had a fairly healthy lifestyle as adults, the women probably didn’t have enough to eat to actually get pregnant to bear children, and the children didn’t have enough to eat to survive. Now the stability and controls of “civilization” did give women enough to eat to get pregnant and bear children, and it gave the children enough food to survive. On the other hand, it exposed everyone to far more war and disease, as a result of greater population concentration, and this killed almost everyone off by a fairly early age, just after they had a few children. The fact is, living in any early civilization would have been pretty awful. A bunch of close-packed, dirty, violent people fighting over every scrap of food, and transferring every type of disease to each other, with no real concept of health care, at all. In contrast, the paleolithic lifestyle, wandering the earth and gathering food in the wilds, was comparatively pleasant and healthy, although the people were often hungry, with no stable, reliable source of food. Still, the paleolithic was probably the “golden age” sung of in almost all civilizations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Really, that depends on what you mean by “science”. Certainly you can question any particular scientific theory or discovery fairly easily. The word “science” really just means knowledge. So, the issue might be simply how much we really know. Naturally, professional scientists will praise themselves and their colleagues to the skies, after all, their livelihood largely depends on their credibility. Scientists will all say that they are making spectacular progress, and that the world should be very grateful to them for doing so. But, the reality is, most people are not particularly impressed with science, and scientists these days. I would argue that scientific progress in the last seventy years has, actually, been very modest. True, we’ve moved forward in computer technology quite rapidly, but, other than that, we haven’t done much of significance. And, the basics of computer technology already existed seventy years ago — computers were used to win the second world war, and the transistor was invented in 1947. A very meaningful indication of how relatively little progress we’ve made lately is the simple fact that life expectancy has only increased by 10% in the U.S. in the last seventy years, while it increased by 75% in the previous seventy years. This despite the enormous investment in health care in the U.S. Obviously, our health care professionals and medical researchers in the U.S. are doing some serious scamming! And, take Elon Musk — please! Here we have a “great inventor” explaining how, every time his Starship blows up, at a billion dollars a pop, it’s a “great success”, and we should give him and his engineers and scientists more money. And, the government and his investors do just that! I can certainly understand how young people would simply see scientists, engineers and doctors as total frauds and scammers these days. It makes perfect sense, to me.