I have to say that finding trustworthy people seems to be much harder than it should be. One of the groups of people which I will generally trust what their findings say is scientists. Obviously not everything that they say is absolutely true, but the actual science part is before the interpretation goes into it. In the case of dinosaurs for example, anybody can say that they didn't exist or that they did and got wiped out somehow, but the bottom line is that there are dinosaur fossils that have been found all over the world and there is no way to refute that. Someone would have to come up with a conspiracy theory of people burying these bones, which is just ridiculous. The point after the bones are discovered, when people try to determining more than is actually present, is where the problems and mistrust can arise. I say all this just to talk about NASA. I trust most of what NASA would tell me. It wouldn't surprise me if they know stuff that they won't tell the general public, but I don't see why people wouldn't trust what NASA actually tells them. It's all the end products of science, the tangibles and the useful discoveries. People can say that the moon landing was staged in a Hollywood set all that they want to, but the fact of the matter is that nobody would go to that much trouble in the first place to stage the takeoffs and landings and then make the video of them actually on the moon, plus there are visible signs of the endeavors such as satellites orbiting the earth that can be seen with the naked eye. Most of what NASA does is develop technologies that perform specific tasks, these are very hard to doubt since they are actually in existence. The only part that I could seen having a lack of trust in would be the theoretical sector where they don't have hard evidence. They talk about how they think that they found traces of water on Mars or something like that but until they actually go there and investigate it, it is still a theory and therefore can't be fully trusted anyways.
As far as I can tell the tenuous relationship between creator and created that is shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey is very far away if even possible. As it relates to us right now the only way that technology can control us is if we let it, such as with the online video games like WoW, GuildWars or SecondLife, movies that are constantly being churned out, and music that people can't live without. The entertainment technologies are a big business and are such because people spend so much time involved with them. If people spent less time watching movies then less movies would be made in the future. If half of the people playing WoW quit all of a sudden, drastic changes would have to be made in the games infrastructure. If hardly anybody went out and bought a rap CD then very few rap Cd's would be made. It's all simple supply and demand and the supply which we have today shows the type of demand that is involved with this technology. It is dominating the lives of people because they let it, not because it is trying to. I saw a show recently on the Discover Channel about the cars of the future and what they might look like in 25 years. The show was talking about a car network that would allow cars to talk to each other and drive themselves at high speeds with little following distance and still be safer than drivers today. Many people cringe when they hear about this idea but only because they fear giving up control. This sort of thing still makes it very hard to get taken over by the technology, especially because it has an override and it can be adjusted to varying degrees of control. Technology won't take over it's creators, it won't even come close for many many years.
Absolute rights and wrongs absolutely exist. There is always going to be an absolute good and bad, right and wrong. Man can not achieve this absolute but it still exists. There is also the absolute best that any given person actually can achieve. I believe that everybody is morally obliged to perform this action, the problem is just that the majority of people seem to not be very morally inclined. I view this as very similar to my grades in High School. My mom would always tell me that it didn't matter what grades I actually got just so long as I did the best that I could. There was always the possibility of getting a 100 on the test, but for purposes of this analogy we will assume that academic perfection is impossible, which it really kind of should be anyways. So as long as I tried my hardest in the class and on the test then I should be happy with what I did. If I skipped class the day of the test and ended up getting a horrible grade in the class just because I wanted to go to the amusement park instead that day then I should feel bad about my effort and I really did do a bad job in the class no matter what people could try to tell me. This means that my 95 in a class wouldn't necessarily be better than my friend's 78, it's all relative to the person it involves.
