From the helicopter, heavy machine guns mowed Iraqi civilians down.

Friends, while I was looking at some tragic television footage of the Gulf oil spill I had the thought that the invention of the motor car has brought with it some serious problems.

I then began to reflect upon other inventions that have brought us trouble and strife and, after quite some time, I arrived at the conclusions that the two worst inventions in history must surely be internal combustion engine and gunpowder (which led to the development of the gun)!

Taking the gun first, the invention of gunpowder allowed us ‘civilized’ humans to move away from the bow and arrow, broadswords and spears, etc, to an invention that accurately fired a projectile that penetrated the body of an enemy and made a mess of his or her internal organs.

First we had muzzle loaders and cannons and soon came machine guns and howitzers. The efficiency of these weapons over arrows and spears can be illustrated by the slaughter of the Red Indians in America or the Zulus in Africa.

Once the means for mass killing were in our hands, engineers refined them further and developed other products like missiles and bombs. The ultimate offshoot of gunpowder is the nuclear weapon which exceeds the wildest dreams of those who thought that gunpowder was the ultimate discovery.

Then came the discovery of the engine that replaced the horse. Soon it was propelling a cart-like vehicle which quickly was refined into an automobile. Henry Ford got the show on the road with the T-model and humans abandoned the majestic horse and took to the roads.

Subsequently, the car became more than a means of transport. It became a status symbol, one carefully cultivated by the advertising industry. Everyone wanted a car and wanted everyone else to see their car and see how successful they were to own this model or that. With the car came the need for petrol, cheap petrol, and the oil industry was born and from it came the plastics. The rubber industry also grew as did other industries involved in manufacturing parts for cars.

So now we have a situation where  T-model-type cheap cars run all the way up to a monstrous vehicle called the Rolls Royce which has gold fittings and costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In between are the SUVs which guzzle gas and pollute like crazy.

Of course, billions of cars needs lots of petrol so all over the world, petrol is being extracted and more reserves are being looked for on land and even under the ocean. This is causing climate change but no one seems to care.

Of course the internal combustion engine allowed humans to fly. Quickly the airplane was adapted to killing and machine guns were added and the capacity to drop bombs.  The early propeller engine was refined to the jet engine and today we have fighter planes that can exceed the speed of sound and fire missiles that can be targeted to within a few millimeters. Thus gunpowder and the internal combustion engine, refined over and over, combined to create a fearsome killing machine.

It’s not hard to conceptualize how much better our world would be if gunpowder and the internal combustion engine hadn’t been discovered.

Perhaps the electric car might’ve been invented first and saved us from global warming.

Perhaps peace might have replaced the profitable war industry.

Perhaps our world might be worth living in.