We
live in a world where the issues of technology are constantly
challenged. That makes sense when the technologies are new, untried
and still in dispute. But I don't believe we have a deep gut sense of
how solid the creations of past technology have been and how far they
have taken us and our lives. Most people have no sense of how informed
we are by technology.
Thinking back on the space program that landed humans on the moon, sent satellites to orbit Mars and cameras past Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto, we may not have appreciated what that technology proved.
We have proved, with the space program, that Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were correct in their description of the world. We have proved every important mathematical structure from calculus to linear algebra and infinite sets. We have proved nearly every step of the technological ladder over the past four hundred years, with the launches of our rockets. Technology is a ladder, we are standing on the top rungs of thousand of ladders that converge to send and receive an electronic signal from an object many times more distant than the sun.
When someone says that signals from their microwave, high power transmission lines and cell phone cause cancer, they don't have any deep gut understanding of the world that technology has brought us and why we know what we do know.