Annoyed by endless spam in your inbox, tired of being called on your mobile every 5 minutes? Well, more and more people nowadays think that modern technology tends to make our lives faster, more stressful and hence harder! Come to think of it, if we are to look just at the ways people communicate what were your alternatives when you wanted to talk in the "good old days"? Letters or face-to-face. The first took days if not weeks to deliver and the second severely diminished your choice of interlocutors. Whereas today there are so many ways we can get in touch with one another: cell phones, business or personal - where you just sit and talk, landlines, internet, mobile internet and so on. The fact is that unless you are a high-profile manager, nobody regrets now a bit of speed.

A more interesting debate would be about how we would be able to adapt to a world without things we more or less take for granted: from running water and central heating to the iron and the hoover as we know them. It is everybody`s nightmarish vision that all the comfort that the gadgets and gizmos have caused might collapse and we would have to go back to tilling the land and hand-wash our clothes.

To better understand how our future would look without science and technology maybe we would better turn back the time and take a peep into our own past. In the early days, when there wasn't running water, nor gas or electricity hand-laundry used huge amounts of water. About 400 pounds of water pumped from underneath the ground for one wash, one boiling and one rinse. But technology saved the day in 1691 when the British, after doing the math of the waisted natural resources and deeming it not sustainable, invented the first washing machine.

The role of science becomes more obvious in hygiene and medicine. It is no secret.....anymore, that in the 17th century the medical theory was that germs were good and hygiene bad. Germs were said to float in the air and enter the body through the skin and hot water made people more vulnerable to diseases since it opened the pores of the skin thus making it easy for the germs to find a way into the body.And this is just an example among many. Suffice it to say that our great-great grandfathers used urine to treat acne to feel grateful for the wonder hypoallergenic, all0skin products science has given us.And in order to get here substances had to be painstakingly broken down to the very atoms, then put together again to concoct new drugs. Fairly few people know that drugs have become such an important and sensitive issue nowadays that managing them separately has become a new business specialized in what experts refer to as "compound management".