Humankind has control issues, and they’re about to get a lot worse.
Once we lived with a sense of our own limits. We may have been a hubristic kind of animal, but we knew that our precocity was contained within a universe that was overwhelmingly beyond our influence. That sensibility is about to return. Along with it will come a sense of frustration at finding many expectations dashed.
Will the waning of human control over the environment lead to a religious revival? Perhaps. Given our propensity for language-making and hence question-posing and story-telling, it is likely that many of us will find mythological lessons in this historic transformation (recall Icarus or Prometheus).
Whether or not it’s ultimately good for us morally to have a sense of limits, the reality is that our powers are indeed limited, and our ability to control our environment must ever be subordinated to the imperative to live in harmony with it.
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