Is Technology Inevitable?

 

Americans have stopped several technologies in this century.

*We no longer use radium watch dials,

*DDT is banned,

*Lead in gasoline is banned,

*Nuclear power plants have not been initiated in the U.S. in several decades,

*Deployment of space lasers has been stopped,

*Supersonic commercial aircraft are not being built in the U.S. and their landing rights are severely restricted,

*Smokeless cigarettes were never marketed.

 

Americans have also stopped risky research:

Research on biological weapons, in the U.S., was stopped by treaty.

Research on humans without consent has been stopped, for moral reasons.Before the mid- 1960's this comprised a major area of medical research.

A great deal of painful research on laboratory animals has been stopped, and much more research has been restricted, as a result of the animal rights movement.

Research on sub-cutaneous birth control, done on black teenage girls in the late 1980's, was stopped for moral reasons.

The Texas super collider was stopped because the line of research involved seemed too expensive and depleted other research budgets.

The 1993 underseas temperature research using loud noises in the Indian Sea was stopped because of environmentalists' fears of harm to hearing water mammals. The project ended up doing a little work with a different technology (less noisy surface buoys), but died after the costs of fighting the environmentalists used up the research budget. (www.mhhe.com/earthsci/geology/oceanography/topic/ocean2.html)

A 1990 research project to put iron filings in the Pacific Ocean off Panama was stopped. The test was designed to see if iron filings provided the necessary nutrients for plankton to grow in large enough quantities to solve the CO2 greenhouse gas problem. Environmentalists opposed this research for fear that the unknown consequences would be even worse than greenhouse gases. (www.geo.nsf.gov/adgeo/press/pr9655.htm)