Ethics of Science and Technology
- 4 Posts
- Age 18
On the early morning of Tuesday April 4 2017, several attacks with chemical weapons occurred in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria. A chemical weapon is any toxic chemical, or a precursor, that is used to cause death, injury, temporal incapacitation or irritation. This was followed by the bombing of a hospital where persons were being treated. These actions took away 72 lives, many of them being children. Doctors say that the gas used in the attacks was not chlorine, but sarin, which is even deadlier.
Albert Einstein was a German physicist who developed the theory of relativity, the base to create the Atomic Bomb, which was used at the end of World War II in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, 70% of the buildings were destroyed and it caused around 140,000 deaths , similarly, in Nagasaki it caused 74,000 deaths. Both bombs caused radioactive rains later on, and uncountable deaths due to radiation in the next years. In 2005 , Nobuko Shinohara, the widow of a Japanese philosopher corresponding with Einstein, released to the public a couple of letters that the physicist had wrote years after the atomic bombings. In these letters he regretted not being able to stop these attacks.
Both the attacks in Japan and Syria were done with weapons of mass destruction, and they took away the lives of innocent people, leaving a scar in the families of the victims and in world history.
Despite all of this, technological and scientific advances have managed to do amazing things, like eradicate and control epidemics, find cures to several illnesses and even predict natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes- just to mention a few. Nevertheless, these advances have also caused pain and suffering when used to attack other humans.
They have completely changed our lifestyle, yet we don’t notice it. For example, yesterday I arrived to my house after school and after seeing the lights off, my mom told me that there was no electricity. I just nodded and walked towards my computer to work on a project, then realizing that I needed electricity to actually turn it on.
Given that scientific and technological advances can significantly transform nature and society, they must be used and guided with ethic. This is needed to make the world a better place and to prevent attacks with weapons of mass destruction. These attacks don’t bring any benefit, just pain and death.We need to wake up and realize what is happening around us. We are all world citizens, and we must defend the life of those that are not able to do it before it’s too late.