Sunday, February 10, 2013

Reverse Progress?

                        
I don't think it would be too far to say that Homo sapiens are one cocky species. Sure, we've walked the planet for about 2.2 million years now, but hey that's nothing compared to the 4.54 BILLION years the Earth has been spinning. I mean let's not discount it-- humans have made crazy progress that I don't see Horseshoe Crabs (the longest living species) getting anywhere near to. To think that relatively not that long ago (speaking in terms of all of time here) humans were living off of some stone tools and traveling in a nomadic style, is something that we can barely believe as we sit in our big city, but small apartments, our eyes lost in the words on our computer screen. How is that even possible? And we say: Mother Nature ruled us; implying we are now free. If we needed warmth, we used her fire. If we were thirsty, we would drink her stream’s waters. If we needed direction, we would look to her stars. Psh, we think, how primitive! 
So it can be obviously stated that we've grown farther and farther from our natural roots, waving goodbye to the old and constantly welcoming the new. And it did begin to seem as if we were defeating Mother Nature—she couldn't even touch our progress. Weather, seasons, nothing stood in the way. Cars and planes allowed us to move far distances, and Mother Nature’s miles no longer held us back. For warmth, we use heaters, and Mother Nature’s cold temperatures became irrelevant. For direction, we use the Google Map application on our IPhones for instant satisfaction, and we did not have to wait until Mother Nature’s nightfall to find our way. This has been happening for generations, improving and improving. Sure it started out as conquering Mother Nature, but hell, have we reached the point where we are conquering ourselves? We first developed human relationships for help and companionship—only to now surpass this and potentially rid of it. For when you have virtual Facebook friends… what are the point of real ones? We created the public school systems to put nature’s teachings of science and math in everyday lives of the people—and now all can be done online and the point of school loses relevance. Who cares about the value of interaction in school, when soon, knowledge will find a way of just being injected into your brain? Clearly not the Homo sapiens. And so we start our decline. 
            So as we advance with time, there is clearly the ironic matter of our growing dependence on technology. Sure, we may not need Mother Nature’s water and fire and metals as basically as before, but do we not need these to create the technology we boast so much of? No longer do we only use Mother Nature for survival either—how many times do we open our IPhone for games and media, or read books on our Kindle, or drive our huge gas guzzling cars only a few blocks away...in ONE day? Our dependence on Mother Nature has in fact grown, just the median in which we need to depend on it for has changed. This dependence may even be worse than old times, in that our resources cannot sustain such a lifestyle for all. How can one possibly see this as a positive, when things like Facebook and other social media are continuously popping up, isolating us to as little human interaction as possible, and with new technology using just as much of Mother Nature’s materials as ever? The scariest part of it all is, there truly is no way to stop the future and its direction either. Looks like we are all just going to have to jump on this train and hope it doesn't meet an inevitable dead end. 

This video pretty much describes perfectly what I’m talking about here… Check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2mnUdOBRM