Information doesn't scare me...yet. Two things that come off the top of my head make me a little nervous about my future sentiments toward information, technology and knowledge: the fact that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know; and the fact that technology is allowing us to greater realize mutual destruction. Hobbes theorized in his work, The Leviathan that we need a greater figure of government because man is weak due to the fact that anyone could destroy anyone- whether that be through gaining numbers against another or by some other means. This fear encompasses that other means. The fact that the US government has the technology to read a license plate from space scares me because although it means we have a very secure military, it also means that in the wrong hands, technology has the capability of enormous privacy infringement. When my privacy is lost I have all the reason to be suspicious and scared. Since it is, at least to my knowledge (i probably wouldn't want to know if it were otherwise) still in the right hands, these kinds of technological capabilities do not scare me, they only make me wary of the powers that be.

What brought me to thinking about this topic was a trip with my sister to a science museum in Baltimore today. We were in a planetarium watching a show on dark matter and the narrator basically said that we only understand 5% of the matter that comprises the universe. The matter. Not the structures, the matter. So all we have come to know in this world- our laws of everything being made up of protons, neutrons and electrons- falls short by 95%. The reason behind my fear of science and knowledge in general has to be the fact that we are beginning to realize that the more we know, the more we do not know. I guess one could argue that what we don't know is constant and what we do know is only increasing, so it is merely our ignorance and the bliss that comes with it, that is what I am feeling. The discipline of science is based on empirical findings and to know that most of the research that needs to be done to understand the world lies in the future, for me, makes science a place where I am not able to store my confidence or trust. This is all of course in addition to the fact that the knowledge in science changes or leads to changing conclusions as time progresses.  I love science/knowledge/technology/information, but the fact that it may not always love me freaks me out.