Governments have stagnated progress

When we look at progress in the world, we must ask ourselves, “What have we done in the last 100 years?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is a big fat “not much.” The big reason is that we are a capitalist society and nothing gets a chance unless it makes somebody a profit, or gets squashed if it would make someone else a profit. Likewise in the communistic society as we have seen in Russia and in China. Society becomes stagnant and complacent. No chance for change.

There was a jump in development in the First and Second World Wars. New killing machines were developed to annihilate soldiers in the first war, along with advances in aircraft, which would not have had a commercial significance without the war. During the Second World War there were more advances in aircraft with jet engines and rockets and bigger bombers to obliterate cities and kill people. Since the wars, there have been no new inventions of significance.

In the medical field, we have seen advances, but no radical new methods of getting our bodies to heal themselves. Mostly we still rely on the “cut off the disease and pray it has not spread” method.

In our technology, a car or truck is still a wagon, with four wheels, The horse or oxen has been replaced by a reciprocating engine invented over 100 years ago, but the basic patent hasn’t changed. The airplane still has wings and some form of carbon-fuelled engine to push it through the air, but there is no change from the method of the Wright brothers or the glider that Otto Lilienthal flew down the hill.

All this stagnation is because governments around the world are not concerned with the benefits to mankind. They are tied up in the money and economics of world trade and world economic domination. We need to educate the children so they can think outside the box.

Just because Newton formulated gravity, does that mean we cannot overcome it without other ideas? Magnets can hover. Can a computer be connected to our body’s motor functions and make cells heal the diseases? Can we connect to the muscle functions of paralytics to enable their brain to tell their limbs to function? Can we travel in outer space in ships that function without rockets (which many believe are being held secret by some governments for selfish reasons)?

Walter Kerber

Lethbridge