Our curiosity has made us the most advanced species on the planet, but we need to reach a technological singularity in order to completely control nature, which is still impossible at our current level of technology.
With the powerful weapon of curiosity at our disposal, humans have constantly produced countless new technologies, and as a result, human technological progress has been the fastest in recent centuries in human history. From this perspective, curiosity is the most influential emotion in human development. Rather than simply being influential, it’s more accurate to say that it has been the driving force behind our expanding knowledge, civilization, and technological advancement. In fact, without curiosity, we would be a species that would be lucky to survive. But curiosity has always put something new in our hands, and whether it’s a weapon or a piece of clothing, it has given us the means to survive like never before. This fearsome survivability has made us the most adaptable mammal on the planet. Human technology has made us the most powerful beings on the planet, and it’s now at a point where it’s helping us to go beyond survival.
In the past, technological advancements provided us with a steady food supply or shelter from threats. Nowadays, technological advancements in areas directly related to humans have improved survivability, but the most notable advancements are in technologies that are more about convenience than survival, such as information and communication technologies. Nevertheless, the development of efficient energy technologies has coincided with a dramatic increase in the rate of human technological progress. Protecting nature has been a major research challenge since the dawn of humanity, and it continues to be a subject of much research and yielding many results, though not as spectacular as information and communication technologies. As a result, humans recognize that the scope of their capabilities is growing with the advancement of the technologies they have created. Many of them are beneficial to human survival. Human technological advances have been able to offset nature’s energy or defend against it. This has created a sense of omnipotence that humans can do anything against nature. Humans developed a desire to manipulate everything around them, which led to a desire for control over nature. Humans may have wanted to prevent the enormous threats that nature poses, such as natural disasters, or they may have wanted to harness nature’s energy for their own needs. The reasons are complex, but the bottom line is that humans want to control nature, but unfortunately, this is not currently possible.
The first reason for this is that in order to control nature, humans would have to reach a technological singularity. In this case, that singularity is energy efficiency. Another way to say it is to offset the energy that nature has with the power that humans generate. But nature’s energy is enormous. If we define nature as all of the external environment that we interact with, then complete control of nature would be like being able to stop the Earth from rotating or bounce sunlight elsewhere, or being immune to the effects of massive natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. To offset such a large amount of energy, we need to generate at least an equivalent amount of energy. However, generating this much energy requires a lot of resources and efficient energy technologies. However, human technology is still far from being able to visibly control nature. Current commercialized technologies cannot even mimic the energy efficiency of living things. Even this high energy efficiency is not enough to offset the energy circulating within and outside the Earth with the resources available to humans. Therefore, human technology would have to greatly exceed the energy efficiency of life to offset the energy of nature, which is a highly unrealistic goal given our current state of technology. At the very least, the first step towards energy offsetting would be for nuclear fusion technology to be widely used in everyday production activities.
It has been argued that human technology has improved so much that we can gain control over nature if we have enough capital. However, this underestimates the power of nature. If we reduce control of nature to ensuring that humans are well protected, it may be possible, but this is not the correct meaning of control. It would be more appropriate to say that humans have controlled the situation around them rather than nature. There is also an argument that control over nature will be localized, depending on the concentration of capital. This also assumes a small scope of nature, and it can be said that control over the surrounding situation is mistaken for control over nature.
Another reason why humans are losing control of nature is that the acceleration of technological development is gradually slowing down. The rate of human technological development has been increasing rapidly in recent centuries and then gradually decreasing. For example, the increase in horsepower of automobile engines has been dramatic over the past 100 years, ranging from a few horsepower to a thousand horsepower, but nowadays, the difference in horsepower per vehicle is only a few horsepower. In addition, it is not easy for humans to gain new knowledge because the categories in which we understand the world in our current paradigm have broadened considerably. Whereas before, new knowledge was gained at a fundamental level, now it is gained at a micro level in a specific field. In other words, the current way of expanding knowledge is to find small things that are hidden within one large category. In this case, technology development is based on new knowledge. However, since the scope of knowledge expansion is converging, the pace of technological development is bound to gradually decrease. This trend will continue until a paradigm shift gives us a large category of new knowledge. If a new paradigm emerges and new knowledge increases, the rate of technological development will again increase significantly, fulfilling an important condition for a technological singularity.
Some believe that the expansion of human knowledge is in the form of divergence, but this is only partly true for humanistic knowledge, which comes from the mental and cognitive, not from knowledge of nature and phenomena. In the case of humanities knowledge, new interpretations of phenomena and the acquisition of knowledge are divergent as societies and values change fluidly over time. To put it another way, the expansion of knowledge in the humanities is non-convergent, as new facts are constantly emerging and being accepted as knowledge. However, facts about natural and scientific phenomena are already existing within the same paradigm. Even if there is a change in the micro perspective, it has a certain tendency, so accepting these facts as knowledge is a form of filling in the unexplored parts of the already existing categories. Therefore, unless there is a paradigm shift due to the discovery of groundbreaking new facts, there can be no divergent expansion of knowledge.
Finally, human capital is finite, and wasting resources on inefficient ways of controlling nature’s enormous energy can have devastating consequences for the future. No matter how advanced our technological capabilities become, we still need resources from nature to run them. Unless we harvest large amounts of resources from outside the Earth, we have no choice but to use the resources on Earth. Even if we can extract and use energy from Earth’s resources with high efficiency, it is not enough to offset the energy that nature provides on an ongoing basis. For example, no matter how high the thermal efficiency of nuclear fusion technology, there is a constant loss of matter in the process of converting mass into energy. If this loss accumulates over a long period of time, there will come a point where the matter on Earth is not enough to keep nature under control. If we try to control nature in this situation, we run the risk of leaving the planet materially devoid of life and diversity. To prevent this from happening, we will need to harvest resources from other parts of the universe.
Therefore, it is likely that a human technological singularity is extremely far in the future, or may never exist. This means that human control of nature is not possible in the present or near future. However, we can control nature to a certain extent if we limit its scope to a small area. If we limit the scope of nature to the Earth’s atmosphere, excluding outer space, this may seem like a relatively realistic problem. Of course, controlling phenomena within the atmosphere is no easy task. Currently, we can barely keep a single gust of wind out of a building. As such, it can be inferred that perfect control within the planet is also premature. To summarize, complete human control of nature requires, first, the implementation of highly energy-efficient technologies, such as the commercialization of nuclear fusion. Second, the pace of technological development must accelerate as new paradigms of knowledge emerge and greatly expand our knowledge. Finally, human control of nature will become a reality when humans are able to freely extract extraterrestrial resources.
