re: #972 scogind

Let’s give it a couple-a-hundred more years, or so. Keep in mind “modern” is “modern” because its the present, not because it is superior. The time period of the examples I gave was “modern science” now, as you stated, they are just “speculative notions from millennia ago.” If our “modern” knowledge is so superior it would be easy for us to survive if were were magically placed back in time, even as recent as before electricity, indoor plumbing and automobiles. Lots of knowledge is lost in between.

The examples I gave ARE relatively modern examples. Evolution is a hundred and fifty years old, relativity theory is a hundred years old, and quantum mechanics and plate tectonics are younger than that. But they have also been experimentally corroborated millions of separate times and contradicted not once. The statistical chances of their being falsified in the future hover somewhere between bupkus and nil.

And yes, modern IS superior to ancient - FAR superior, at least as far as quality and longevity of human life is concerned. We know more than we did about the world before, and this allows us to do more. It is better for us to have vaccines to prevent disease and antibiotics to treat it than not to have them. It is better for us to have nuclear power, and computers, and TVs, and telephones, and plastics, and lasers, and automobiles, and airplanes, and gene splicing, and gene sequencing, and the Large Hadron Collider, and the Hubble space telescope, than not to have them. To maintain otherwise is to engage in a strange luddite variant of terminally relativist postmodernism.