Poll Bionics survey

[Spacethingy]

The bionics questions continue... Thanks!

As well as the poll:

"To what extent do you think the natural world is useful, and why?"


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[Urwumpe]

Purpose and usefulness is relative.

Just as todays example from my local newspaper:

Beavers are generally welcome, because they prevent flooding along rivers. But now, people plan to drive a group of beavers away, because their digging actions threaten the stability of a local highly frequented road.

How do you define useful then? The sum of all uses that you can see? Many things in nature would then be perfectly useless. You couldn't exist without them, in the long run, but you don't see their use.

 

[Dambuster]

I haven't put any great amount of thought into this, but at the moment I can't think of anything that doesn't come from nature. I'm inclined to think that everything humans have come up with is in fact just applying 'nature' in specific ways to work for our purposes (but taking rockets as example, this would just be applying natural chemical and physical laws in a certain way...but I'm not sure if taking laws such as F=ma and saying that it comes from nature is a reductio ad absurdum [or similar], or even correct [is it actually a natural law?]).

 

[Izack]

More or less every human invention was made out of things. Where does one go about finding things? The world, of course.

 

[Carmen A]

The basic scientific principles for a lot of things came from observing nature. Even today we are learning from nature and some cutting-edge technologies found in architecture and aerospace engineering even exhibit obvious organic influence in their appearance, as though crediting mankind's technological prowess to nature. Nature has captured the imagination of humans ever since there was civilisation.

Some of the most simple things noticeable in life are just waiting to be up-scaled into a technical tour de force.