Question: of the five of you whose work do you think will actually help the human race? and do just say 'mine' unless you actually think it is.

Diana Drennan answered on 21 Mar 2011:

That’s hard to answer. I think all science has the potential to help our race.

Finding new ways to diagnose and treat illness has been helping humans (and other species) for a long time. For instance, developing vaccines to things like measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus, small pox, diphtheria have reduced child mortality greatly in the last century. Many people don’t even know what some of the illnesses I’ve just listed are – which is a really good thing ! Between vaccines and antibiotics, we’ve gotten very good at treating infectious diseases – so that things like heart disease and cancer are now the things most people die from. And, although we’ve gotten pretty good at treating some of them too, there is much much more to learn. …and there are always more illnesses to treat. so, medical research is very important.

I think learning more about how our world works and how to best manage our vast natural resources is incredibly important to help mitigate the damage we’ve done to our planet. What have we done, what can we do to undo the damage, how do we make sure we don’t damage it more – these are all questions that responsible people must ask and learn how to answer. As an example. Suppose you got a new toy for Christmas and you played with it for a while, and when you looked up you realized that your new bazooka had blown holes in the walls of your house. You’d say “oops, I guess I shouldn’t play with my bazooka in the house” and then you’d go about repairing your house. And things might get uncomfortable for a while if it’s winter, or if you’ve cut the electric wires or gas pipes or something. It would be really irresponsible to just say “nah, it’s not that bad – I don’t need walls…..” So too, humans have blown some pretty large holes in the Earth’s ecosystems and it’s up to us to try to fix things…..

Knowing how our brains work, and how we learn things is important for humans to know. For a long time, women weren’t educated because men didn’t know that women could learn as well as they could. People lost the benefits they would have had by educating the other 1/2 of humanity. For a long time people assumed (wrongly) that young children didn’t really learn very much. They didn’t know that there were big differences between children who had lots of stimulating things going on around them vs. those that were left lying in their crib all the time. They thought (wrongly) that the children wouldn’t remember things into their adult hood, and could be treated like miniature adults. Knowing more about how children learn has helped us improve our schools and our teaching techniques and changed our theories about how to raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted kid. I believe that the more we know about how to best teach children, the smarter we get as a group, which can only be a good thing. The more we know about how to give people the chance to be all they can be – to meet their full potential. And that’s pretty important research.

Robots have great potential for helping humanity. They can be used to do things that are too dangerous for people to do (like fly over dangerous places like war zones, volcanoes, hurricanes, etc), or things that we aren’t equipped to do (like fly to Mars or asteroids and roam around and take samples of things), or things that people don’t want to do (like put things together on a boring factory assembly line). As robots get more advanced, the more things they can do for us – leaving us to do the less dangerous, less boring things that people are good at.

Personal care products are important too. Can you imagine your life without hand soap or face soap ? Shampoo or conditioner ? moisturizer or sun screen ? dish soap, laundry soap or fabric softener ? You and your clothes and your house would be dirtier and smellier and there would be more germs and you’d get sick more often. And since you’d have dry, sun-burned skin and sleep on hard sheets, you’d be an uncomfortable, stinky, sick person….

So. hmmm…. which of us will help ? I think we all will. Maybe none of us go down in history as being the reason for the great turning point for humanity – but every little bit helps.