There are many issues in society today, which are

raised from either the introduction or use of technology. Technology is an essential part life in modern day life. The fact that technology plays such an important
part in life is a major reason why conflict and differences of opinions will always arise.

This essay will
attempt to look at six articles from different views of technology. Technology can help people live longer,
protect the environment and many other great things. Technology can also do exactly the opposite, and
sometimes the same technology can effect people in completely different ways. This essay will look at
some issues and attempt to show where these technologies fit into today's society.
Medical technology is a field where there is a lot of controversy is generated. Technology in medicine can
benefit or potentially harm people and other living things.

The first article is one about the "Visible Human
Project". This project is where they take a dead subject and carefully photograph it in a very special way.
What makes this project so special is the technique by which the process is done. The corpse is cut into
four pieces, frozen, and then photographed a millimeter at a time. By slicing off a millimeter of corpse
between pictures, this will give doctors, students and researchers a very detailed and high resolution 3D
image of the human body. This process has so far been done with a male and a woman.

Why is this
important and who cares about a sliced up dead person? This type of technology allows doctors to perform
mock operations or to view specific parts of the human anatomy before going in blindly with the knife.
This article also points out that th!
e technology gained from rendering these images may one day apply to living people by using MRI scans.
This type of technology does not really directly affect people in the day to day life but could lead to better
health care over the long term.
Medical technology can be a great thing. What happens when decisions based on technology are incorrect?
The next article I choose is about a pregnant woman that gets "routine" tests done to determine the baby's
health.

The woman went in for a routine ultrasound and when the results came in there was a problem.
The baby was misdiagnosed as having "Clubfoot". This is a deformation of the foot and/or lower leg. This
brings up a good point of the use of technology.

One of the main points of the article deals with
appropriate technology. The article shows that under most cases an ultrasound provides little or no help
with the diagnoses of problems that could be helped before or after delivery. This brings up a valid point as
to why incur the expense if the expense if the procedure is not beneficial to the parents, doctors or the
health care system in America. In some case such as this, the technology clearly does not fit with the
mother's child rearing process.

If the pr!
ocedure will not benefit the mother then why was the ultrasound performed. This answer could be political
in the sense that, the procedure is revenue for the hospital as well as job insurance for the ultrasound
specialist. The overuse of technology is often found in the medical field.
Martian species is a hot topic recently. This rise in enthusiasm and talk about life on Mars has prompted
discussion about going to Mars to collect samples to find out if there really is life on Mars.

The technology
used in our space program is expensive. Political awareness and enthusiasm is the best thing that could
happen to NASA. The next article I choose to review deals with the mission to retrieve rocks from Mars.
The reason to go to Mars is to establish if life exists on other places than Earth.

The basic premise of the
article talks about the method by which it would be possible to obtain samples by an unmanned mission to
Mars. The way this would be accomplished is by a robot collecting samples ahead of time before the
pickup ship comes to collect the robot. The plan is incremented over the next 5 to 10 years. These types of
missions not only require money but also justification that it is worthy of the money. The fact that
Americans seem to be obsessed with !
life on other planets has enough political clout to allow the justification of the expense. What this shows is
that political pressure can effect the development and use of certain technologies.

The next article that I reviewed also deals with space. This article is important in a few ways. The article
is about liquid fuel rocket engines. The article talks about the different technologies used by Russian and
American's to build rocket engines to propel items into space. Russian technology is more advanced and
less expensive when compared to the American alternative. Companies are looking to the newly opened
Russian market to deploy satellites into orbit.

This less expensive technology not only allows satellites to
be launched into orbit but also has farther-reaching political messages. The one locked iron curtain is now
opened for business. The article states that "It lowers launching costs while reducing missile proliferation."
This is a very important statement in the unknown future of Russia.

Russia and particularly its leader Boris Yeltsin are the topic of the next article. The recent state of Yeltsin's
health has raised many questions as to where and who will perform surgery to correct his heart condition.
This type of problem is very important because it involves the need to satisfy political needs with the needs
to get the proper health care. The reason this causes controversy is because better care could potentially be
obtained outside of Russia but getting care from outside could have major consequences. If a government
leader was to go outside the country for medical care that could show a major weakness in the health care
system in that country. This leaves Yeltsin with a very important decision as to whether to obtain health
care internal and minimize political consequences or to obtain health care outside and minimize health
consequences.

The last article that I reviewed deals with the issue of global warming and test to see if seeding the ocean
with iron could solve it. The article details a procedure of dumping iron into the ocean to spur the growth
of photoplankton. The increase of photoplankton would theoretically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide
thus reduce global warming. The consequences are that little is known about the complex ecosystem of the
world's oceans. The tests show that dumping the iron does spur the growth of the photoplankton. This
does not necessarily mean that there would not be other catastrophic effects from dumping the iron.

Technology can do great things for the environment but technology can also cause great problems because
the full extent of that technology may not be known.
Technology can certainly be a great asset in modern day society. With that technology comes great
responsibility in how and where to use it. Technology can upset of balance many of the worlds natural,
political and cultural systems. Technology without limits and understanding can have great consequences
both good and bad.

The use of technology is to use to satisfy the needs and improve the lives of the
inhabitants on earth.