Technology Without Modern Science

Abstract

Our species, in addition to exhibiting many other remarkable attributes, particularly the capacity to develop very complex languages and social systems, is a maker of tools and a designer of systems of tools. Our primary equipment for this task consists of manual dexterity, stereoscopic vision, sufficient intelligence to carry through a degree of logical reasoning, sufficient patience to become involved in trial and error enterprises, well-developed means of communicating with one another, and the ability to transmit a degree of acquired knowledge from one generation to the next. We emerged on the scene with these aptitudes in fairly developed form about fifty thousand years ago and by using them have essentially taken possession of the planet in the intervening period. Our ancestral hominid species possessed some of these aptitudes but none to the degree exhibited by homo sapiens. Some time in the next century we could, if we chose, take possession of the solar system. That, however, will depend upon social, psychological and economic factors.

The engineer is a remarkable man. He knows little science but create he can!