There are so many reasons to be grateful for science. I could start by mentioning the titanium rod that still lives inside my left leg that enabled my tibia to heal in something like the shape and size it was before it was smashed, and in fact all the other wonderful devices that kept me alive while my body recovered from its injuries almost 10 years ago now. I could mention the computer I’m using to write this blog, and all the other computers whose existence means I have the job I have, instead of one teaching Latin to high schoolers in Pascagoula. I could talk about whatever the heck the thing in the picture above is, if I knew what it was. I could talk about the airplane that safely flew my sweetie off to New York this morning when everyone else in their right mind was hoping against hope that they would be able to fly away from New York.

But all of that is technology, and what I’m really grateful for is science! Technology is a product–sometimes just a by-product–of science. Science isn’t the stuff that scientists figure out how to make, or the stuff they use to figure out how to make the other stuff they figure out how to make. Science is the activity they practice. It is the systematic study of events, and substances, and systems; the development of hypotheses to explain them; the rigorous testing of those hypotheses; and the rejection of those hypotheses that are found faulty and the refinement of those that are borne out.

If you want to know what a world without science would look like, thanks to the Internet, you don’t have to look very far. Listen to some speeches by Republican congressmen on the topics of global warming, human female reproductive systems, and the environmental impacts of petroleum exploration and extraction. Watch YouTube videos on chemtrails, snow that doesn’t melt, perpetual motion machines that really work, and levitation. Read some spam about penis enlargement pills, strange new intestinal parasites that may be preventing you from losing weight, and the berry that big pharma doesn’t want you to know actually cures cancer.

Then ponder for a moment that awesome fact that none of these things would exist if there weren’t (to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan) millions upon millions of people who believe them, in the absence of anything approaching scientific evidence. They’re the world without science. I’m grateful for the rest of the world.