Question: What do you think the world would be like if there was no such thing as science?

Stuart Archer answered on 18 Jun 2013:

That’s a really good question! The Oxford English Dictionary defines science as:

“the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”

This basically means that science is the way we work out how the world around us works – by looking at things and poking them to see what happens!

So, what would life be like if we didn’t do that? To some extent, all life on Earth carries out some kind of science – for example, animals will smell or taste something before eating it to see if it’s a good source of food, or monkeys will try a lot of different shaped rocks to break open a coconut.

Without that, I think life on Earth would be much less complex. I don’t think that humans would exist, as we’ve built our entire way of life on using even the most basic of science to survive. I think a lot of the animals we have today wouldn’t exist in fact. There would probably just be simple life, like bacteria, simple plants, most likely nothing with anything resembling a brain!