Took a minute to find the start of this. I was comparing the odds of the human race surviving with or without science underpinning education and political discourse. The problems you talk about stem from when we don’t use science to make decisions. There is also that convoluted problem of treating science as a belief system, but that’s not scientific thinking.
I didn’t say our “odds are improving”. I don’t know what that means since it would require picking points in time to compare. I was comparing thousands of years ago to now. Science took a few thousand years to develop so I can’t pick a date when things suddenly improved.
Evidence. Listed by how species go extinct.
Overpopulation and destroying our own habitat.
Civilizations have done this a few times, but not yet on a global scale. A scientific approach allows us to examine those mistakes.
Famine
The green revolution gaves us tools to prevent starvation. We have applied those tools poorly, but that’s a poor application of science, not a failure of it.
Disease
This is an easy one. However science can’t help us with our relationship to death. Our ability to keep people alive when their capacity to enjoy and engage with life is diminished has created a moral dilemma.
Communication
Science gives us tools for communication but it can’t help us with what we say.
Racism
Tribalism has some power as a survival mechanism but it gets in the way of advancements like the ones mentioned above. It took science to show us how we are related to each other and the planet.
That’s a start. Before coffee.