Technology evolves everyday more and more without the public ever noticing. Every day we have machines that are faster, smarter, more resistant and efficient and it is impossible to keep up. We see the result of the advancements, but never think about how they come to be. We have smarter phones, smaller computers and even hearing aids implanted directly into our skull, but we never question the technology that makes all this possible.
We have all heard about 3D printers, even about the theory that soon 3D printers will create our meals, but does anybody really think about the science and mechanical genius that go into all the technology that we use on a daily basis?
People talk about the technological boom we have lived in the last century, but I don’t think the public actually knows how deep these advancements lie and at what cost they have come to humanity.
Newly graced parents nowadays often try to feed their children only organic products, not realising that in many cases ‘organic product’ in this time and age is only a label.
How can you guarantee that the carrots you are feeding your infant are organic, if they need water and sun to grow? When I was a child, many years ago, they already taught me that rainwater was contaminated. That the chemicals they use to help their crops grow don’t just stay where they are sprayed, but distribute themselves all over the planet.
In which case, how then can you grow something saying it is without chemicals, if you grow it under the sun and the rain. How can you promise me that the land you grow the organic products on isn’t contaminated from times when people didn’t care too much about what kind of chemicals saved their crops from dangers, as long as it worked?
Have we finally found a way to cleanse the earth of all the chemicals we don’t want? Or to clean the air of the products a housewife uses to disinfect her home and to kill the spiders and flies that happen to enter their living quarters?
Personally, I think instead of trying to go back to our roots and live more healthy doing things the way our ancestors did them, we should embrace the technology that we have and accept that the world is not the same as it was one hundred years ago. We have equipment, like the electrospinning machine, that can web textures in a clean and disinfected environment, at sizes the human eye can’t even perceive, allowing us to create building blocks for much bigger and better things. Lasers that are so precise, they are used to perform operations on the human eye.
But instead of using these technologies to enhance and better the most important aspect of our human life, food, we let the farmers and merchants go o’natural, believing the lies that consumerism tries to communicate to us.
Why should I feel safer knowing that the only things that have made these vegetables grow are sun and rain, when I wouldn’t dare to drink a glass of rainwater.
I know I am a hypocrite for judging other people’s’ life choices without knowing their reasons, and I do not wish to offend anybody with the statements I have made. The only thing I wanted to make clear is that we have this incredible gift at our disposal, which for some reason, instead of applying it to every and all aspects of our lives, we decide to focus our advancements on the basic and unnecessary like mobile phones and televisions instead of finding ways to clean our air, purify our water and eliminate all the cancer developing genes in our food.
We have young engineers who can design machines to clean the waste out of the world oceans, but nobody who wants to pay them, because you can’t gain money by developing something so necessary for the human race.
I just hope that someday my children’s children will have a world to live in where they can see what a carrot looks like outside of photos, see birds fly south for winter and not have to visit a zoo when they want to see an animal that walks on four legs.
By Juan Uceda
