Wow. A couple of points to address some of things brought up above.
Historically, there's been a lot of talk about humans being the height of creation, the master animals, the pinnicle of evolution. The assumption underlying those statements is that there is a value judgement. This thinking leads to the idea that we are so special that we are somehow seperate from our environment. I happen to disagree with this conclusion.
Our specialness within the natural world is that we are the only species that actively model our world in order to change it. We are the only species that we've been able to discover that not only can think through changes, but we can make models of the natural world in order to understand better how it all works. Every other species we've ever studied is primarily reactive. Some are more adaptable than others and can exploit new situations they find themselves in.
Think of the macaques in Japan who learned that the yams humans were feeding them tasted better when washed in salty sea water. This behavior was then taught from mother to child so that it is a behavior of the groups years later. The difference between this adaptation and human behavior is that we may make accidental discoveries like this, but then we are able to extrapolate from that experience that perhaps if we dip other foods in salt water they'd taste better. We can deduce general ideas, models, of our world and create new things from those models. No other species has ever been shown to do that. In other words, no other species has science.
Now, whether that behavior is "special" or not is a value judgement. There is no question that we have taken this ability and used it for ill. As I said before, from the very first artificial extension of our abilities, whether it was sharp sticks, fire or stone tools, that technological advance could be used for good AND ill. This remains true to this day.
And as the extensions to our powers grows in strength and impact, the potential for harm also grows. This also relates to our ability to destroy ourselves through war, pollution, etc... But the hopeful aspect to all of this is that along with the problems, once we've identified them as problems, comes the ability to use the same modeling to derive solutions. Read the latest issue of Scientific American to see at least one example. There's an article on the ability to create designer molecules that "eat" pollution and turn some of the deadliest toxins in existence into harmless substances. Yes, technology created these toxins, but we can also create ways to nutralize the damage that's been done, and to find better replacements as we better understand the impacts of what we've done. As our ability to model the universe increases, our ability to determine these negative impacts before they happen.
In the end, it's a matter of what happens first, we find better ways of dealing with the mess we've made, or our experimentation with insufficient evidence of impacts will poison us all. This goes back to the "destroying the earth" statement. It comes down to this, the Earth will survive without us (short of us figuring out a way to destroy the actual planet). It may be denuded of most life, it may be poisoned, but give it a few million years and it will be right as rain. We, on the other hand, while hardy and adaptive, can only really live in a fairly narrow band of environments. So, I'm not too worried about the Earth, but I am more worried about our ability to survive. I'd like to see us be good stewards of what we've got, but we can easily tie good care of the environment back to selfish reasons. (and I believe we're the stewards of the environment not from any religious reasons, but because we have the ability to destroy it. With great power comes great responsibility)
As for power issues, yes, energy is a major challenge facing us. The good news is that we're developing much better, more efficient, lighter, cheaper sources of energy (nano-designed, carbon-tube solar panels and nano-tech batteries...) at the same time as we're about to break into a whole different realm of computer, quantum computing, that will actually require much less power to run. Those huge, hot, electricity-hog server farms that run things like the internet, Google, etc. will be as extinct in 2025 as the Neaderthal is today.
Some very persuasive research has shown that our technological capacities have followed a pretty reliable trend since the very earliest evidence of hominids. This trend is not linear, it is logrithmic. What that means is that while in the short term it seems that we're developing technology along at a fairly regular pace, in reality that pace is times two, rather than plus two every couple of years. And as we start to go around the knee of the curve, these continuous advances actually increase the factor by which we are developing. How long did it take 1/4 of the population to adopt the telephone? How long did it take 1/4 of the population to adopt the web? Adoption rates are increasing, innovation rates are increasing.
In mathmatical terms, if we count the technical development rate of the year 2000 as x, if things were linear, we would expect 100x amount of technical development over the 21st century at year 2000 rates. Instead, with our increasing rate along with the logrithmic nature of development, we will actually have 20,000 years of development over the 21st century at year 2000 rates. It is our responsibility to ensure that this development does work to better the human condition, which does include our environment.
I personally believe that the last two hundred years will be seen as a watershed with the industrial revolution of the last 150 years seen as a horribly destructive period of human history that we'll survive, but will be digging ourselves out of for a while.
Plane
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