Humanity has progressed by transforming nature since the Industrial Revolution, but as an immature species that cannot control even itself, it is questionable whether we can ever fully control nature. The imbalance between the pace of technological advancement and human intellect can have serious side effects, and humanity’s inability to adapt to the altered nature will likely lead to extinction.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, energy conversion was not well understood: the only machine capable of converting energy was the human body, so production was largely driven by human and animal muscle power. However, around 1700, the invention of the steam engine, which converts the energy of boiling water into kinetic energy, gave us the ability to convert relatively inexhaustible resources such as solar and hydroelectric energy into the energy we needed, leading to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution led to intensive advances in technology and changes in social structure, and for the first time in human history, supply outpaced production. This led to a shift from the pre-industrial era’s emphasis on thrift and frugality to the post-industrial era’s emphasis on unbridled consumption. This shift led to the emergence of consumerism, which has led to social problems such as overconsumption and obesity. The Industrial Revolution also saw humans break free from their dependence on nature and begin to shape it to their liking. By cutting down forests, draining swamps, damming rivers, laying hundreds of thousands of kilometers of railroad tracks, and building mega-cities with skyscrapers, the Earth was transformed to suit the needs of Homo sapiens. As a result, habitats were destroyed and species were driven to extinction. The book’s author, Yuval Harari, refers to these human actions as “nature transformation” rather than nature destruction.
So, if this modification of nature continues, will humanity in the future be able to fully control nature, i.e., will we be able to completely control the uncertainty of natural phenomena and rearrange them to our liking? I believe that humanity will not be able to completely control nature, but rather will be dominated by it, possibly to the point of species extinction. The rationale for this is twofold.
First, homo sapiens is an immature organism that cannot control itself. We have created social and political structures based on various political ideologies, such as capitalism and socialism, to control ourselves and continue to live as a community. However, these structures have various contradictions and loopholes, and there are many side effects due to the imperfect system. For example, democratic socialism seems like the perfect idea of equality, but it can lead to worker laziness because the fruits of labor are distributed equally. To prevent this laziness, dictators emerge to impose control, which eventually degenerates into dictatorship, which leads to social inequality, which is the opposite of its original purpose. Capitalism, too, appears to be a perfect ideology that guarantees freedom and equality, but the unrestricted freedom of economic activity has led to a concentration of income, which has increased social conflict, and poor working conditions and environments have made life more difficult for workers, which has increased the efficiency of production but not the equity of distribution. In addition, monopolies have arisen to pursue more profits, giving a small number of giant corporations great influence over society as a whole. Humanity is not in full control of the structures it has created, so how can we expect to control nature, which we still know very little about? Even if humanity makes tremendous progress in the future, it’s a delusion to think that we can completely control nature while we remain ignorant of it.
Second, our intellect cannot keep up with the pace of technological advancement. We’ve gone from being an insignificant species living in small villages to dominating entire planets and venturing into the vastness of space. While future humans will continue to gain knowledge through scientific revolutions and make tremendous technological advances, the rate of evolution of human intellect is very slow compared to the rate of technological progress. When an intellectually immature human race deals with overly advanced technology, there are bound to be side effects. A classic example is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On April 26, 1986, an explosion and subsequent radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union killed millions of people and contaminated the surrounding ecosystem to a degree that has yet to be recovered. The accident occurred because humanity has lost control of nuclear energy. We have developed the technology to build nuclear power plants and extract energy from nuclei, but our intellect hasn’t kept up. As such, we are still immature in our handling of science and technology. In the future, when technology becomes more advanced through the Scientific Revolution, it may be completely out of our control. In the end, the misuse of technology may lead to human extinction.
Third, humans may not be able to fully adapt to a nature that has been radically altered for our benefit. By analyzing data collected since 1923, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland found that the Sahara Desert has expanded by more than 10 percent in about 100 years, making it already the size of the United States. In addition, China’s State Forestry Administration released the results of its second national wetland resource survey, revealing that the country’s wetland area has shrunk by 8.8 percent in 10 years. The Brazilian Amazon forest, dubbed the “lungs of the earth,” is estimated to have lost 2,000 square miles – 8.6 times the size of Seoul – to overdevelopment in the past 12 months. If we continue to modify nature for our own benefit – cutting down forests, carving up mountains to make roads, and so on – the nature of the future will look vastly different from the nature of the present, and it’s entirely possible that species will emerge that are better adapted to the modified ecosystems than Homo sapiens, the species that drove the modifications. These species may be pre-existing, or they may be newly created by humanity through advances in science and technology. They may dominate us, or they may drive us to extinction.
In the future, humanity will make tremendous progress through constant scientific revolutions, but our ability to fully understand and control the vastness of nature is far from sufficient. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that nature is too vast for humanity’s capabilities. Eventually, humanity’s ignorance of nature will cause it to try to change too much and lose control of its transformations. And when it loses control, it will be dominated by nature, which may lead to the extinction of species.
