Exactly how "perfect" would a vegan world actually be?

[Red]

While religion and morals often do go hand in hand, most religions also encode some notion of acceptance of suffering and death as inevitable and part of "God's will". Whereas the whole point of science is to try to push the needle on these issues.

If you managed to get a religion on that idea and had it reach global dominance I would agree, but it's a very hard sell when people are breaking their asses farming and trying not to freeze to death or die of smallpox.

The idea that life is suffering is pretty universal in all ancient cultures for a reason (although with some variations), and they tried to explain why, and how to make it somewhat meaningful. It's not like nowadays where you have freedom and comfort to persue goals and derive meaning, you had to keep people somewhat motivated to do hard labor and not murder eachother.

Sure, the vast majority of people throughout history were employed/enslaved in daily back-breaking labor, with little time to rest and think about how to improve things for everyone. And we've had periods of natural disasters, wars, and famine where everyone was struggling to survive.

That was basically all of history before the industrial revolution. Tuberculosis alone is credited with 25% of all European deaths. And one bad weather event could throw your entire life in jeopordy.

But we've also had periods of peace and economic surplus that afforded people much more leisure time, and we have always had ruling classes who were granted some ability to direct society and their own personal efforts as they see fit.

Which time periods are you referring to?

If you lived in East Asia or Europe or Northern America your entire existence was pretty much dedicated to either preparing for winter or surviving winter. I don't think people had much time for leisure even during times of great progress (which is only relative for the time).

There have always been low-hanging fruit, technologically/scientifically speaking, that have remained unplucked for hundreds of years, and I believe the reason for that is that people weren't really particularly motivated by ethics. Things could have turned out much differently, I think, if we had adopted a strong moral framework for ourselves much earlier on.

I can see that being the case, if people believed that understanding the natural world would help them improve conditions for humanity, but religious beliefs back then, including Christianity (even if it were based on morality) all kind of operated under the assumption that life sucked ass by default and that's just how the nature of human life was, and I don't think there would have been any way to see otherwise (I'm sure some philosophers recognized the value of science, but the average person would probably see that as ludicrous and out of touch... kind of like how some people view it today). I'm not sure if a religion based on ethics necessarily would have understood that learning as much as you can about the world can potentially cure disease and build skyscrapers. Christian scholastics came about much later.