In 1974, the famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was asked to give the Commencement Address as part of the graduation ceremonies at Caltech. His address, which he titled Cargo Cult Science, quickly became famous and the text can be found in many places on the internet today.  At the time of his talk, all kinds of crazy myths about our world were reaching astonishing peaks of popularity, mainly propagated through the medium of paperback books.  This realm of fantasy presented as reality is most often referred to as pseudoscience.  Feynman's talk covered a huge range of examples and topics, too many to summarize here.

Some of the topics he included:

Feynman died in 1988. Just a few years after his death, physicists were constantly grappling with the need to improve and speed up communication between widely separated people working on the same research topics. Their efforts led to technology which quickly spread beyond the scientific community, through personal computers and (later) smartphones, out to the entire world. The completely unexpected and completely unintentional result basically seems to be in the process of destroying human civilization!

Prehistory: 1969 - 1971--- The federal agency ARPA, later known as DARPA, had the task of finding ways to apply state-of-the-art technology to problems related to security and defense. One of the earliest problems tackled was how to maintain communication between national laboratories in the event of some nation-wide calamity. The solution was to link all the mainframe computers of the laboratories in what was called the internet. The original version was ARPANET. It soon occurred to someone that this system could be used for very direct communication between specific individuals at the labs... in other words, e-mail was born... the textbook example of a "killer app." A number of early e-mail pioneers contributed to the development of e-mail as we know it today. Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing e-mail as a networked communication system for ARPANET in 1971. Other key innovators include computer scientists Gary Thuerk, who sent the first unsolicited commercial e-mail in 1978, and Shiva Ayyadurai, who copyrighted an interoffice e-mail system called “EMAIL” in 1982. During my own early research career, circa 1975, e-mail had spread to all physicists who had government research contracts, at first with the Department of Energy, later also with the National Science Foundation. This early system was called bitnet.

Late 1970s--- the history of personal computers is long and insanely complex. But the first practical and versatile home computers began to be offered in the late 1970s. They steadily grew in popularity. [By the way, such computers were first depicted in a short story by Murray Leinster in the ASTOUNDING science fiction pulp magazine's issue of March 1946! In this tale the main use of the devices ("Logics") was to pay remote visits to museums and libraries!  However, in the story, when artificial intelligence was added to the system, the "Logics begin offering up unexpected assistance to everyone, which includes designing custom chemicals that alleviate inebriation, giving sex advice to small children, and plotting the perfect murder." [Compare to recent headlines! ]  As the 1980s and 1990s wore on, home computers became almost universal.  [By the way, I have never owned one!]

The first web page, complete with hyperlinks.

1990 - 94--- At the gigantic accelerator facility known as CERN, in the 1980s, it was not uncommon for hundreds of researchers, located at many dozens of different institutions spread all over the earth, to be involved in any given experiment. A CERN computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, was thinking about how to facilitate communication between the large number of members of these groups, specifically about the current status of the experiment on which they were collaborating. He realized that what was needed was something like a page of a magazine, which would ideally include text and photos and diagrams, and which could be updated many times daily if necessary. Working toward this aim, he quickly invented the web page, the html language in which the pages were written, the web browser on which to view the pages, and the World Wide Web, which made the pages available in just about any developed nation on earth (1989 - 90). A key feature of the pages was hyperlinks, single words or labels which the user could click on to be carried to other pages!  The first generally available web browser was NCSA Mosaic, which quickly evolved into Netscape Navigator (1994), from which most other browsers have evolved. To quote Wikipedia, "The Web has become the world's dominant information systems platform. It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact...."   AND THAT HAS BECOME A POSSIBLY FATAL DISEASE.

Not the first edition, I couldn't find a large image of its cover.

In 1995, science popularizer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan published the final book he would live to see in print, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD. He died of cancer in 1996. At the time of writing, he foresaw that the age of science could easily come to an end in our lifetime. The internet was still in infancy, so his focus was on the various other mass communications media of the era. He noticed how relentless they were in spreading pseudoscientific nonsense, while minimizing coverage of actual scientific fact and discovery. Literacy was fast diminishing, and paperback books were rapidly being replaced by word-of-mouth about exciting non-facts more and more often gleaned originally from web pages, but communicated at third- and fourth-hand.  Here is the unique thing about the internet today.  Suppose you somehow become convinced of a "fact" that is totally nonsensical and obviously false... that the earth is flat, that dinosaurs never existed, that disease is caused by poor diet and not bacteria or viruses, that vaccines cause autism, that the most recent full moon somehow completely controls your behavior for the rest of the month, that... etc., etc., etc.  The incredible thing is this: no matter how deranged and preposterous your belief is, the internet allows you to find and get in contact with hundreds, if not thousands, of other people who share pretty much precisely the same lunatic belief!

TWO OTHER CONSIDERATIONS:  (1) The rising tide of illiteracy--- This was the subject of a bestselling book, Why Johnny Can't Read, as far back as 1950, and Feynman mentions the problem in his 1974 speech. At the present time, it appears that about 50% of the adult US population cannot read well enough to understand simple dose instructions on a prescription drug label. (2) The failure of science and math education--- There was nationwide hand-wringing over the dismal state of science and math education in the US immediately after Russia launched the first earth satellite in the Fall of 1957. No reforms since have had any impact. In fact US K-12 students generally come in near dead-last in international studies of general science and math knowledge among students at various grade levels.

FINALLY:

When you have to tell people this, the battle has already been lost...