/sci/ - Science & Math

this post

Dark Ages and destruction of the library of Alexandria

black death, probably
though, the flu or smallpox has killed more people

Religion

Seriously. Its a cop out lazy answer for "Where did everything come from?" Imagine if everyone one day realized religion was false. They would ask "Ok where did we come from REALLY?". I honestly beleive we could answer that question fairly quickly if humanity set our minds to it.

global warming, no I mean the real one, the recent 10,000 year warming period.
all these fucking monkeys running around and building shit.

Hands down, the invention of television.

>>2268040
What the fuck are you smoking?

Religion (general)

The Dark Ages caused by Religion (specific)

Burning of Library of Alexandria, etc. by ignorant religious peasants.

Seriously, the church's defeat of learning, free thought, and accumulated knowledge gave us a thousand year pause to advancement.

And when you look at how far we've come in the last 500, 400, 300, or even the last 100 years of science, you can realize how much damage a 1000 year set-back is.

The Holocaust didn't really slow advancement. Medicine, chemistry, physics, math, etc. were not lost. Many fields like nuclear physics were even given extra funding.

Roadbumps from natural disasters or buildings blowing up are trivial compared to mental diseases such as religion which can render entire generations into vegetables.

Natural selection.

>>2268054

Well I appreciate what he's getting at. The mass media has done a good job at eroding the critical thinking / objective reasoning abilities of the masses and has everyone chasing material possessions and elusive pop culture behavioral trends in order to fit in.

>>2268061
True. I watched an hour of Fox News and I swear I lost mental capacity.

hmm interesting how i just watched the first episode of cosmos and how a few people here mention the alexandria library. carl sagan was praising that place.

development of the ability to manipulate? dont know^^

>>2268060
was before humanity. Besides, picture a world where dumbasses had the money to do whatever they like...

>>2268022
Holocaust is hardly the worst thing to have happened. Without the Jews, the Middle East might have developed into a peaceful 1st world country by now..

ALSO, the world wouldn't be populated with millions of extremist religious nutters..

Plus, on a simply numerical count, there's been far worse cases of genocide throughout many parts of history. Its an overrated event.

>>2268055
Nice indoctrination you have there. You might want to practice being quiet in public so people don't catch on so quickly what a retard you are.

>>2268040
I agree.
TV > Religion when it comes to create sheep from human.
But we can argue it is the use of TV , not the TV itself which is destructive.

whenever knowledge got destroyed,
like >destruction of the library of Alexandria
and what the spanish did in their conquests in America
Or what the mongols did during Genghis Khan
any other takeover of power where the loser got destroyed with all the knowledge

>>2268036
religion was actually an important pacifier and it gave stability, even with all its negatives

WW2

Most deaths, most suffering, most damage

>>2268030
The Great Library of Alexandria is definitely up there. Science was indeed set back hundreds of years by its destruction.

The dark ages, which I would argue that we're not completely free from yet (until all religion is abolished), also set the world back hundredres and years, and ALSO prevented many great minds from achieving great things.


>>2268032
It could have potentially been the worst thing, but Europe, the greatest contenent of all, recovered brilliantly.


>>2268036
While I hate religious fanatics with a passion, and agree that above all religion has stunted the social consciousness and intellectual potential - possibly no worse crime is possible, religion has done a lot of good in the world (albeit misguided in many cases)

Going by numbers of deaths alone:
European Colonisation of the Americas, Africa and Asia
Black Death
Great Chinese Famine

mfw most of the books in the library of Alexandria turn out to be bad homoerotic and pedophilic poetry.

The Fall of Rome.

You can thank Germanic barbarians and Abrahamic Monotheism for plunging humanity into the dark ages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
this maybe, but i guess it probley didnt slow us down


but probley religion, Library of Alexandria, House of Wisdom and even not trying to leave low earth orbit in the last (almost) 40 years

>>2268092

Meh; with -6 million jews to deal with I think the carnage of WWII balances out.

Religion is an obvious contender... but now that some anons mentioned it I think TV is another big one.

Going further, one could say that any factors which contributed to a loss of critical thinking, emotional maturity and abstract moral values in humanity should be blamed as the worst thing to ever happen. Where this argument is concerned, TV, government, capitalism, materialism, pop culture and religion all come to mind.

I really don't think you could say that one event or one trend in particular was the worst thing to ever happen. All events are connected and dependent upon past events.

Religion.
As of 23:44 - it is still all a bunch of bullshit.

>>2268100
Abraham made Rome fall?

>>2268075

Troll harder.

Holocaust is easily the largest genocide on record.

>>2268109
Adoption of Roman Catholicism as the state religion led to Rome's cultural decline.

The Germanic barbarians destroyed Rome physically, and started the middle ages.

Define "worse".

>>2268100
>The Fall of Rome.

Agreed.

>You can thank Germanic barbarians and Abrahamic Monotheism for plunging humanity into the dark ages.

These are not the causes of Rome's fall.

>>2268120
Rome was on the decline before Christianity. In fact, it was on the decline before it stopped being a republic. Religion was not a primary cause of its collapse.

>>2268111
>>2268111
Um.. have you not heard of Stalin or Mao?

You also need to keep in mind that Hitler wasn't just killing off Jews, the numbers you read from Germany include many types of "undesirables" including homosexuals, and foreigners in general.

>>2268111
>The official toll of excess deaths recorded in China for the years of the Great Leap Forward is 14 million, but as of 1987, scholars had estimated the number of victims to be between 20 and 43 million.

>>2268022
Religion is generally considered the fucking worst shit to ever happen to humanity. It makes people dumb, lazy, war like, narrow minded, irresponsible, gullible and infantile (just to name a few).

>>2268125
>>2268128

The adoption of Monotheism may not be the principle cause, as you can argue Rome declined due to mismanagement, inflation, etc, but despite Rome already in a state of declining status, it's still agreed on that Christianity superseding traditional Greco-Roman culture was one of the nails to the coffin.

The Protestant Reformation. That made everyone hate each other and caused stupid people to believe stupid false things.

>>2268140
All of those are intrinsic human qualities. You can see them emerge in basically any philosophy or belief, religious or non-religious.

>>2268143
One of the nails, yes. But it didn't cause the collapse, and in its absence Rome would still have fallen. That's all I wanted to say, really.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.
it killed off whole towns and villages so i'm sure this would be the top 5 to be the worst thing to happend in human history.

interesting thing is this flu did not kill the very young and very old. the reson for this is becouse the way it would kill a person was by rasing there immune system to the point where it would start attacking the body.

so the young and old have weak immune systems hence why most who contracted it did not die.

>>2268143
I've never heard anyone but teenage atheist ignoramuses claim that Christianity had a negative effect on the efficiency of Rome.

>>2268153
please be trolling
like I'm not going to say how or why you're wrong, because this is such a trolly post that I have a stomachache now
and if it's not trolling, dear god, my anus will bleed

The acceptance of/belief in the state as legitimate, necessary, so on. It has had the most enduring effect on humanity. In fact most of history is actually about the state and things it has done.

>>2268140

>>2268199
>the acceptance or/belief that capitalism is legitmate and necessary. All of the wars of the last 3 centuries have been wage for capitalism.

Fixed

>>2268199
>dumbfuck

I'm sure the society where babies are made into pies is cool with you, but not me bro. Enjoy constantly fending for you fucking life!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

>>2268222
>All of the wars of the last 3 centuries have been wage for capitalism and religion

fixed

I'd have to go with the fall of the Roman Empire as well.

>>2268222
>>2268242
> statism is teh best. i love licking boots.

Death of Archemedes/Burning of Library of Alexandrina

In Human History?

Gosh, probably intellectual property laws starting in the Industrial Revolution--

Major strides could be made in medicine, technology, Software, etc. without the red tape of litigious society and consumer laws... A truly free market would put us decades ahead

Britney Spears

>>2268221

i think you mean "place face here"

>facepalm.jpg

inb4 i was trolled

Modern day capitalism, more specifically the patent laws and putting a label and your name on something as ridicolous as the way in which a user can zoom on a touch screen (see apple)

Christianity, Judaism and Islam, hands down.

>>2268040
woah man, that's liek totally deep

>>2268262
>working more then 12 hours a day without overtime pay is so fun...oh wait I never had a real job thats why I've yet to have contempt for the capitalist system

Fixed

>>2268143

Rome declined because its people were weak. After Caeser, the empire was already done.

People back then prayed for Rome to fall. And when it did they prayed for her to come back.

Ronald Reagan

>>2268319

TRUST ME GUISE

IT WILL TRICKLE DOWN. I THINK.

I want to make an opposite comment;
War is the BEST thing to ever have happened to humanity.

And religion caused many wars.

/thread

>>2268266
I've noticed quite a lot of dislike for patent laws about the place.

I'm in a position where I have a patent to my name so I'm reasonably bias here. Inventing is not big money a lot of the time and a fuck load of effort goes into making a new idea into something working. Followed by getting it out there and people wanting to use it, makes it almost not worth it. Especially with the cut the inventor ends up with by the end. No organisation really wants to be the first to use a new product, too much risk involved. So if some shit can just take the concept from you and rush it into market before you as he has more contacts, what is an inventor supposed to do?

I've tried to ask why the hate in the past but I usually just get 'HE COPIED MY IDEA WAHH WAHH' as a rebuttal, shit sucks

>>2268340
sanitation?

>>2268319
>>2268337
>so I told them the wealth would trickle down

>>2268346
Progress.

we decided to clamber down from the trees

A cave man once said, "this is my stone. If you stand on it, i will chop your head off." This is basicly the worst and most influential thing that ever happened to us.

>>2268311

Ceasar was never an actual king, he was an imperator but back then, to rule Rome by yourself was to be king and that is what Ceasar wanted. Imperator was more like a commander and the title was later used by the roman emperors as no one dared declare themselves king, not even Augustus Ceasar who was to most powerful of the early emperors

>>2268285
Care to elaborate on why you think this?

>>2268343
The patent laws have good intentions, namely keeping large companies from stealing people's ideas then profiting from them while the original inventor gets nothing.

Regardless of what the law is, it's only a matter of time before the powerful (companies) figure out how to game the system, or have the laws subtley changed to benefit them. Patent law does not serve the purpose it did originally, and now we see companies patenting seemingly obvious ideas so they have a large collection of patents they can use to sue any competition that arises.

Most large companies have big patent portfolios, and if one big company sues another big company it can be expensive since both companies have patents, and money they can use to defend themselves with.

The big losers are the small businesses who do not have lots of money, or patents, to protect themselves from lawsuits from larger companies.

bringing niggers to america then freeing them

>>2268343

I understand that inventing isn't easy or well-paying and that a person should be able to earn form what he makes. But the laws currently allow too much. There should be more limits to what could actually be patented.

>>2268372
I can agree with that. Particularly who the big losers are...

>Virgin Mary's conception taken way out of hand
>Mohammad's epileptic uprising
>Fall of Rome
I think that summarizes this thread

But also:
I vaguely recall reading some article about Homo erectus (or some other ancestor) being nearly eradicated by some terrible freeze; I suppose that's valid

>>2268343

Don't get me wrong -- patent law is a two-edged sword; It may benefit, albeit, very little -- an inventor, but consider a large public employer with an immense R & D department;

Prospecting on Intellectual Property has become the future Real Estate bubble of the mid-21st century -- everything from genetic code to financial security packages can be patented as long as it doesn't violate any of the laws of physics --

While you personally may see a little benefit (and I'm being serious when I say congratulations) consider how these laws have abused and what the potential is for future abuse by the big fish.

Ice age.

Set the species back by hundreds of thousands of years.

>>2268266
Not sure about the free market bit, but we have overly codified a lot of very basic governmental procedures. The blame almost always rests upon special interest groups and the lawyers that they sick on legislators.

Our tax code in the USA did not balloon to over sixteen thousand pages because collecting taxes is an impossibly complex science. It got that way because everyone wanted a loophole, and no one had the spine to say "No."

>>2268357
[citation needed]

String theory.

>>2268411
>Set the species back by hundreds of thousands of years.
>Implying that homo saipens are older than 200,000 years

>>2268452
>implying humans are older than 6000 years

pants

When you were brought into this world

>>2268452
I think he meant that we could be hundreds of thousands of years further in our technological development had the ice age not occurred. It wasn't a literal statement.

The retardation of human progress by the mental illness of religion

Christopher Poole.

>>2268470
Or we may not even exist. We could be even 'less advanced,' by we referring to all species on Earth as a whole. You can't say that increased time a species is around is going to lead to increased intelligence. In fact, wouldn't have lots of small mammals have faired better from the ice age? Maybe it was a key event in allowing humans to one day dominate to begin with.

>>2268363

Caesar's Triumvirate was immensely powerful. Under their rule Rome was an unstoppable force that would have conquered and taught (which was good about the Romans. They didn't conquer to conquer, they conquered to make civilizations more intelligent and useful to the empire) the whole world if more leaders like them arose.

>>2268476
THIS.

>>2268479
More time on Earth = more time to evolve = smarter species

justin beiber in Never Say Never

>>2268492
It's not that simple. Other variables could have undermined our development.

The loss of faith in God and Jesus. Seriously, this thread is riddled with hipocritics and you will all go to hell.
I do physics at undergraduate. I am a scientist. And I still know that God exists. It's so obvious. Stop being dicks and just help your fellow man like jesus said.

>>2268502
Will do.

>>2268502
>hipocritics

Shut the fuck up, Sarah Palin.

>>2268481

Romans conquered for the same reason everyone else conquers, for wealth. Your utopian view of the roman people is somewhat hilarious, I suggest you read a bit about the people, but in general Rome was just a powerful city state with an unprecedently reliable army. That allowed them to grow in a somewhat contained manner

>>2268502

1/10, too obvious. You need to be more subtle when you try to troll.

Though this is /sci/...

>>2268492

Ice age might have actually been a huge burst for human creativity. It forced the species to adapt in an unprecedented scale

>>2268535
Hahah like you know how to troll

Religion.

9/11

I don't see religion as being that bad. It set and guided our development of law and morals. Now you could say 'I'm not religious but I still have morals!", which could be true. But your morals have been influenced by society. And what about earlier humanity? With such strong education and unable to think logically and clearly. Even some of the most morally guided people in this day and age still have their faults, what about these people being kicked around on the bottom rung of society thousands of years ago?

I'm not saying that we would NOT have developed our own laws and morals if there was no religion, but it certainly would have taken much longer. Religion is irrelevant nowadays, but for all the bad it has given us you can't say that it hasn't given some good. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, unless it's a 24 hour clock in which case it's only right once a day or some shit.

>>2268452
Holy shit! Why is your mom on here again? What did I tell you the first time?

>>2268580
go back to church bigot

>>2268624
Faggot

Religion didn't cause the dark ages, rather the collapse of the empire so great it encompassed pretty much the entirety of the civilized world caused the dark ages. The Church stepped into a power vacuum, and even then they weren't consistently the dominant political force of the Dark Ages and the subsequent Middle Ages like so many people believe. The Church was pretty consistently pressed under the thumb of petty warlords masquerading as monarchs. Bishops were threatened with death or actually hacked to death by knights in their own cathedrals, brought up on false charges in civil courts for daring to say anything against the authorities, and in many periods the Pope was effectively a prisoner and all the proclamations supposedly issued by him were either coerced or outright forged (the infamous Spanish inquisition was of this type - initiated by civil authorities under the supposed authority of the Church when in fact no such authority was granted except by forgery).

All of that's not to say that the Dark Ages weren't bad times and a huge setback for civilization, or that the Church of that period was an enlightened institution, but the truth is quite complex. Most people's ideas of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages come from proponents of enlightenment philosophy who had a specific rhetorical agenda in mind.

Of course, I don't expect to get much credence on /sci/ where everything negative said about religion *must* be true.

>>2268630
Marshmellow dick

>>2268633
Stud muffin :D

>>2268631
I agree with you, sir, even if no-one else does.

>>2268521

I'll admit, my instructor of Latin and Roman History has caused some bias in my views of the Roman Empire.

He was very good friends with the man who wrote the Cambridge Latin Course books and an excellent teacher.

The Romans did teach their conquered people though. There's no doubting that.

>>2268658
Loner

ITT: why /sci/ isn't /his/.

>>2268580
>I don't see religion as being that bad

>>2268022
Nagasaki

inb4: your mom

Death of Hypatia/Burning of the Library of Alexandria

>>2268342
>>2268342
well said

When the Europeans stumbled upon a land to the west of theirs (the Americas), bringing death with them.

Religion

black death was good

shook off the dark ages and started the fucking renaissance

>>2268030
this guy has it right
Dark Ages set tech back ~300 years
And the Library of Alexandria had a model for a FUCKING STEAM ENGINE
I MEAN HOLY FUCK
THEY HAD YEAR 1700 TECH
BEFORE 400 AD

Once upon a time a guy told to an other guy: Hey thats a big purse you got there. Arent you afraid of carrying it to the other town? Here i have a friend in that town, give me your money and i will give you a piece of paper, take the piece of paper to my friend he will give you money

>>2268022


When greed met ignorance, probably the worst thing

>>2268061

The masses are not very smart. They never had objective reasoning capabilities.

The ensuing destruction of pretty much everything at the end of each Chinese dynasty.

>>2268810
The Chinese don't fuck around.

zionism

China more or less missing out on the Industrial Revolution.

>>2268891
/THREAD

Invention of alcohol. An easy way to get women in the sack but at the cost of not learning how to transform the human populace into pure energy.

Invention of efficient farming techniques. Now the population can grow indefinitely and easily.

>people think religion burned down the Library of Alexandria and not Caesar.

Just because you put "smartest history major in the universe" in your name field doesn't make it true.

>>2268907
And yet, the population pyramid is actually reversing itself. imagine that.

the invention of religion.

>>2268022
the rape of the "New World"

>>2268709
So instead of countering my points you just post a picture of a man laughing at the camera and quote a part of my post.

Idiot.

>>2268956
this is why i never come to this board. angsty simple minded teenage faggots

Sirians showed up. Fuck

Shoemaker-Levy 9's 1994 impact with Jupiter.

The spread of Islam.

>>2268502
> I still know that God exists. It's so obvious.

Provide scientifically testable proof of this.

The extinction level event that happened a few hundred thousand years ago that left only about 10,000 breeding individuals alive among the entire human population.

Islam and Christianity. Look at how many butthurt godfags there are now.

>Religion

Seriously. Its a cop out lazy answer for "Where did everything come from?" Imagine if everyone one day realized religion was false. They would ask "Ok where did we come from REALLY?". I honestly beleive we could answer that question fairly quickly if humanity set our minds to it.

Are you me?

>the WORST EVER thing ever happened in human history
The industrial revolution.

>>2268788
Banking...

>>2269223

Idiots who want to go back to feudal society.

IE, you.

Class differences are indirectly responsible for almost every problems humans face

That or the formation of political parties in America.

The horrible horrible sex between Homo Erectus that lead to our creation. Damn you Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grea
t-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Gr
eat-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-
Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grea
t-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Gr
eat-Great-Great-Grandpa!

>>2269293

scarcity of resources coupled with unfair division of them BASED on class differences.

Disease.

Any other answer in this thread is wrong.

The development of modern medicine.

Overpopulation will in the long run lead to more human misery than any war or disease.

capitalism

Religion In general.

Why so many butthurt anti-capitalists on this board? Mad that you were born into a wealthy country with market-based economy? (Psst, it's no coincidence!) Pretentious anti-capitalists are the worst anti-capitalists there are.

indifference

That time in high school when I was fingering my girlfriend in my bedroom, and my mom walked in without knocking and said that dinner was ready. Then she decided to have a conversation with my gf while I surreptitiously tried to extricate my hand from her pants. However, my sleeve got caught in her zipper, and I couldn't get it out. After about three minutes of my mom's pointless blather, I think she finally noticed, because she left quite abruptly. It was never mentioned, but still... and then every once in a while we'd be having sex and my gf would bring up that incident, which is an instant boner-kill. WORST EVER.

>WORST EVER thing ever happened in human history
that's subjective

The prophet Abraham

Black Death is definitely up there as far as the last 12,000 years are concerned.