I bet Ross Aitken's ancestors in caveman times were a boring lot .....

"Watch this! See, if you hit a piece of flint in just the right place, you can make a sharp edge!" "That's dangerous -- you could have somebody's hand off with that!"

"Do you know, if you rub two sticks together, you can make fire?" "Well, better not. It's dangerous. Somebody could get burned!"

"Hey! I've discovered something really neat. If you throw a bone with some meat on it at a wolf, it will follow you around." "Ooh, that sounds dangerous, somebody could get hurt. Better safe than sorry, eh?"

And imagine if somehow, without the benefit of weapons, fire or hunting dogs, they made it through to the time of the Industrial Revolution .....

"You want to have all the workers together in one huge 'factory' instead of in their cottages? That sounds dangerous. What if there's an accident? Hundreds of people could be injured or killed! At least if they were all in separate cottages, there would only be a few casualties."

"We should ban steam-engines. They spew out filthy black smoke, they use coal which has to be dug up in thoroughly unsafe mines, the pipes leak steam and people get burned, and sometimes they even explode!"

"Electricity? You mean the power of lightning? That's a bit dangerous, isn't it? Look what it does to buildings and trees!"

The sad fact is that *all* human progress, *ever*, has depended upon the taking of risks. This of course means people getting hurt, or even killed -- but the point is, they learn how *not* to get hurt, and the benefits become available to everyone. Then the next generation find whole new ways to injure, maim and kill themselves in the name of science .....