Where would we be now

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Well

Nobody has a comment on what really holds us back
Science for how many thousand of years
Thankfully a the Arabs kept it alive

Nothing like ignoring history and reality to make an ideological point.

So the church has always been for advancements in science

Physician cure thyself.

still not sure how one can derive a chart involving "scientific advancements" and how one could track just how much knowledge was lost in a time span.


it's a cute little chart and a funny idea but realistically, it'd be more like decreasing the slope for the time period....not going backward.

Lol, and you're sure you aren't confusing cause and effect?

Not exactly Orwell's point, however, the church and advancements in science aren't in 180 degree angles. I mean, it cannot be said that Christian monks were anti-intellectual, but rather they still tried to promote knowledge and learning.

Additionally, the Christian dark ages were periods of significantly worsened conditions than had existed in Rome, and it is somewhat doubtful that the changes in social structure were just the results of Christianity but rather a lot of other factors seem involved. I mean, generally speaking the Renaissance was also the period of time after Europe had recovered from all of the junk besetting it, including the bubonic plague which had taken away a large percent of the population, and was of course, not so soon after the fall of the Roman empire which was very disruptive.

Day to day life was hell even outside of the larger plagues and outbreaks of Mongol violence. Aside from maybe the Congo it made third world living in our day and age look preferable. Likely rather than having that be a reality instituted by religion, religion was probably one of the few things keeping most people from slitting their wrists - aside from fear that they might survive it and get an infection.

The dark ages were brought about by the collapse of the western half of the Roman empire, not christianity. Furthermore, The Byzantine empire, the middle east, and east Asia did not go through the dark ages and they did not bring about the technological advancements suggested as being posible on that graph either.

^ This. How do we know we wouldn't have a straight line instead until it starts going up? =/

Although religion no doubt had a major effect in locking down scientific discovery the roots of the problem lay somewhat deeper. Scientific advance is based on getting down to the grime of reality where materials react with each other and people with jobs to do wonder what the hell is going on and how to get their work done. This beginning is in technology, not pure science. Religion and much of philosophy in general deals with the interaction of abstract principles, many of which have little if any base in reality. Religion especially deals with things like ultimate perfection, souls, God, sin, guilt, life after death, good and evil, etc. which exist mentally but almost always are too vague and culturally based to get much grounding in the dirt of everyday life. Plato's insistence that reality lay in the abstractions our sense perceptions made in our minds was more real than the stubborn interactions of material things was one of the bases of the divorce of observation from pure mental speculation. Another major factor was social hierarchy. Much of religion has very rigid hierarchies and the higher you go the less the official has to deal with everyday problems. Catholicism gulped down Aristotle and enforced his ideas with no relevance to actually testing his speculations which are frequently way off the mark. It tied down this brittle and frequently false philosophy with the same rigidity it refused to accept any doubts about any of its dogma and that's why Galileo suffered because revealing any Chinese in the absolute authority of the church generated the fear that the whole structure might come tumbling down. Science became effective when the disdained dealer in material reality, was accredited with knowing how things actually worked. The bricklayer, the ironworker, the chemist, etc. had to deal with reality or he was out of business and the philosophical aristocracy and the theologists refused to touch these physically dirty people who knew what they were doing. Science moved when these guys were welcomed, appreciated, and were permitted to contribute to the abstractions which were then retested by physical reality which religion disdains.

It wasn't just Arabs, it was also Jewish scholars who lived in the Islamic domains. Aristotle was a very big hit with Jewish scholars. The primary example being -Guide to the Perplexed- by Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon). Maimonides plowed the field for Thomas Aquinas who sowed and reaped it a century later in Europe. Maimonides was the court physician for the Caliph if Fostat in Egypt. If one needed treatment or surgery (forbidden to Muslims), Maimonides was the doctor to see.

In Andalucia, Jewish, Chrisian and Muslim scholars translated many of the works of the Greek philosophers and geometers. That is how Aristotle and Euclid were rescued from obscurity. For a tragically brief period, Islam had an intellectual flourishing in Persia, Baghdad, Andalucia. Then the religious bigotry within Islam snuffed that brief flame. The Islamic religious bigots scooped the brains out of Islam and blinded their own eyes.

ruveyn

Considering Rome fell to Barbarians (a goodly number of which were Pagan.... The idea of Progress (arising out of the Renaissance, and given a good shove by Protestantism) was perhaps lost for a while.

The desire for stability (no regress, no progress) was attractive to many a civilization; Egypt, China (who actually kicked the Huns out so hard, they wound up destroying Rome a few centuries later.. didn't give much impetus to a systematic search for knowledge. A lot of civilizations just want things to stay the same.

Until someone solves the Einsteinian light barrier problem, we'd still have to explore the Galaxy verry....sllllooooowwwwlllly...

Breaking the lightspeed barrier would essentially mean moving into the realm of time travel and teleportation. My guess is that it's probably coming fairly soon (give or take 60 years) but physics will have to redefine some things as far as how they currently perceive dimensions beyond the 3 we currently move freely in.

Breaking lightspeed may be 60 years in the future, but, like fusion power, looks to stay there.