Blog of a crazy man

Much delayed, but here it is, my essay on Technology, Mankind, and the Environment.

Depending on what you believe mankind either started using tools millions of years ago, or just a few thousand. I myself am a creationist so I believe that mankind was created and, therefore, started using tools about ten thousand years ago, but I don’t think the time frame is that important for this essay. The important thing is that mankind started using tools, and this is the first form of technology.
For this we must turn our attention back to when technology started. Technology’s initial use was in farming and hunting, allowing man to control his immediate world. Because of the increased food and shelter which technology provided, the land that could only support a few could now support much larger numbers. So as the numbers increased civilization arose, and, from it, better technology. This started an upward spiral, technology increases numbers and increased numbers brings better technology.

So what then is the problem today, since technology seemed to do its job so well why is it now malfunctioning? The answer, I believe, is that technology now has not changed in its purpose, but that its the way in which that purpose was carried out was flawed. Technology initially only had to support only a small number of people, and if the technology happened to have negative effects on the environment wasn’t important because even if the whole of people utilized the destructive principles of their technology it would not destroy the entire environment, but instead only cause local and temporary side effects. Technology helped increase man’s population, but the technology didn’t change in purpose from supporting just a few to supporting a massive population. So now with a population of immense proportions technology is beginning to show it’s inadequacies.

With this our question becomes, why hasn’t technology adapted? The answer to this can be found by better understanding how technology works. Technology’s purpose is to make life better, but in attaining this purpose technology had to change the immediate world in which man lives. Man can’t have shelter without cutting down trees and replacing them with a building, and he can’t plant farms unless he plows the land. So technology can be described as working by changing man’s immediate surroundings to better support him, but we see something very interesting happened at this point, man initially only changed his surroundings with the idea that there would always be some wild natural world around him from which he could attain what he needed. The problem with this being that as man started changing his planet the natural world around him was replaced with the technological world which was never made to be self sustaining.

Now, before you start thinking that I am just writing this to suggest that man go back to nature and abandon technology, we must understand that man cannot go back to nature because his population has grown beyond the point that nature can support, even in its unaltered state, but, all is not lost, technology as I said has the purpose to make man’s life easier. So in the face of its own death, technology has already begun to change to better support the mass of people, just not in the way that you would expect.

Since man can not go back to where he started, something very strange has started happening, which at first may seem to contradic everything I just said, technology is now undertaking the task of replacing the natural system that once supported it with a technology friendly version. Technology has started producing a high yield low footprint version of nature, Nature 2.0 if you will. The beginnings of this can already be seen in farming where people have started using genetically enhanced crops to get more food from a smaller area, but even without genetic engineering the origins of Nature 2.0 can be seen even in corn, which no longer exists in its wild state but only in the domesticated variety. Nature 2.0 can also be seen in computers which allow people to replace wasteful things like paper and shopping malls with high efficiency machines. We are only seeing the beginning of the transformation, Nature 2.0 will be vastly smaller with exponentially greater potential than the current natural system.

So yet another question arises, how could something whose very foundation is flawed be able to change itself in such a way? This brings us to another interesting fact, technology doesn’t do anything of its own free will. After all, we don’t sit down and expect our computer to have suddenly upgraded its own code and magically fixed all bugs or write our essays for us. For technology to work, it must have an intelligent guide, that guide is mankind. The flaws then must have been from mankind’s flawed ability to create a self sustaining system. This is probably just a result of man’s inability to see far enough into the future to predict what their system would do to the earth. So now the system has started correcting itself, not of its own free will, but because the guiding intelligence of mankind has now reached the before unseen future and recognized the flaw in what it created.

Technology, though, won’t stop with just changing nature to suit man. It will eventually start changing man himself. As the Nature 2.0 system starts to become pervasive many of man’s physical characteristics will begin to change as they become unnecessary or just not as efficient as they could be. Not to say that what makes us human will change, we will not just be machines without purpose, we will still have the mental characteristics of our old selves, but our physical appearance will change. We can already see this starting today, just look at plastic surgery. Even that is just superficial, but that will soon change.

Several other authors have attempted to predict the paths man will follow as his physical appearance changes, and I won’t go into those possibilities here. We’ll suffice it to say that man will need to change.

So with that said we can see that the future will hold many changes, but man will still be man and nothing more.

It’s a little later than I said it would be, but here’s is what happened on my date. I went with her and my brother and his girlfriend on a double date. So we picked her up at 5:00PM and went to a local fair. At first she didn’t like me, because I’m not a very talkative person, and she thought that I wasn’t talking because I didn’t like her. I explained that I don’t talk much and after that things started going better. Later in the night we got off of the Hurricane and she was cold so we hudled together. Much unexpected to me, she turned around and kissed me on the cheek, I think she was aiming for the lips but missed because she was still dizzy from the ride. Overall the date was good despite the bad start. I’m going to be taking her to her homecoming next Saturday.