Science Retires

Author's preface: Because this story did not meet Vocal's ludicrous 600 word count minimum I am forced to add yet another annoying author's preface. This is in addition to the author's postscript at the end of the story which contains my anti-censorship statement and which I intend to attach to every story I publish on Vocal until such time as those policies are eliminated. Vocal refers to these policies as "community standards" but please let's call a chicken a chicken, or is it let's call a duck a duck? I actually don't think it is either of those but whatever, it is censorship plain and simple. See my article here which defines four of my biggest problems with them, but there are many more. In any event the big question now is exactly how many words am I at? Have I made it to the magic number of 600? If only Vocal's editor provided a word count for me so I did not have to waste 2 minutes cutting and pasting into Microsoft word to check. But alas, they do not. I am going to cross my fingers on this one, roll the dice and say, yes, I have now hit at least 600 words. Here's hoping! By the way the post is a humor classic from my vast library of The Onion style satirical news articles.

Science announced today that it was retiring, nearly five millennia after it first burst on the world scene among the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians and later the ancient Greeks, then quickly rose in stature to become one of history’s most important, if least well understood worldviews. Though it always remained well behind religion, none, and other in the rankings of humanities mechanisms for understanding the universe and their place within it, it never let its lack of popularity among the masses stop it from achieving great things. Generations of schoolchildren will always remember science as “that class we all had to take, that was super boring, and hard.” Throughout history science suffered through some difficult times, often at the hands of its arch rival religion. The persecution of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Church in 1615 , which concluded that heliocentrism (a primarily scientific view of the rotation of the planets) was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”, is but one example. But plucky little science persevered and never gave up. Until today, when it announced it was throwing in the towel. Science cited the rise of technology as the main reason for its retirement saying “I had a good run but my time has come to an end. With machines learning left and right, and artificial intelligences on every street corner, the world no longer needs science. Or logic apparently as I must point out that the term machine learning is composed of two terms that when combined in that order result in a logical contradiction and a thing which is logically impossible. If a machine could learn it would no longer be a machine, but I digress. It is time for technology to take center stage and lead humanity in its quest for understanding, and the elusive 15 camera smartphone. I leave feeling good about the contributions I made to humanities progress, and with the utmost confidence that technology is more than capable of continuing the work I began. Plus, unlike science kids love technology, what with all the gadgets and stuff so that’s a big plus. Who knows maybe technology will be able to heal the riff with religion in a way I never could. Now wouldn’t that be something? A religion based on technology. And, by the way, I do apologize for scientology, you need to know I had nothing to do with that.” With that science bowed its head, turned and slowly walked away.

Author's postscript: "Publication of my works on Vocal.media do not represent in any way an endorsement of their outrageous and unjust censorship policies. I do not support those policies and in fact find them absurd, abhorrent, and an affront to free societies everywhere. Thank you for reading my works here, but know they are published under conditions in which freedom of expression is being muzzled. Therefore, any works of mine you read in these pages will not reflect the full range of my interests and certain topics will be by necessity greatly minimized or entirely absent. Please accept my sincere apologies on behalf of the editors and moderators of Vocal. Since they won't do it for themselves I will do it for them."