Adaptation to alteration – Is human race knocking the door of Dark Age?

World is moving fast, as fast as sometimes I feel my head spinning.  Every day one and other technologies are constantly becoming obsolete by one or other new technologies. Dynamicism is at its zenith and everything is in it’s engulf. Rate of technological progress has far exceeded the rate of human population growth.

So, are we at the height of civilization, or as we say height of renaissance or age of enlightenment?

Let me define the word enlightenment, of course as per my own definition. Enlightening is a beautiful word and it has ability to give a beautiful meaning to one’s existence. An enlightened human is a complete human being with complete cognizance of his/her surrounding and ability to cope with it effectively keeping in mind of every macro and micro life existed in planet. Is today’s technocratism leading to us to that?

Since the time of Darwin mankind has known the secret of adaptism. Adaptation has become the buzzword and has been the matter of pride for mankind. But in the subsequent 250 years, concept of adaption was slowly replaced by concept of alteration. Alteration is the buzzword today – if we can’t adapt, we alter. If we can’t cope up with nature we alter the nature itself. Technological progress, genetic modification, destruction of natural habitat, examples are numerous.

When we talk about impending danger on human race (only human race actually, other species are encouraged to preserve just to facilitated existence of human race, i.e. to maintain balance in ecosystem) by global warming and numerous other reason, we only talk about macro facilitator like logging, mining, infrastructure etc etc. We never talk about the micro development in our life which is actually leading to these macro reasons. We never talk about everyday small small technological invention or innovation. We hail those technocracies as they make our life simpler.  Writing a letter was replaced by mobile phone. Not only time taken in communication was greatly reduced it also relieved the pain inflicted by pen on delicate hand of human being.  Pen is replaced by keypad or keyboard which was faster and much easier.  Very soon human hand stared tiring out with keypad and then came the touch screen. Why push a button to type, just touch it. Several micro second of human life was saved by switching from pushing to touching. Now we are tired of touching to, our delicate hand is gradually becoming incapable of doing that, so we are coming up next with smart phone which can understand from our gesture what we want, after some years they would be capable to compile our mind directly and work accordingly. We don’t even have to blink our eyes. Some time it’s just dreadful to think that where it is going to stop? Earlier we used our brain to adapt ourselves to our environment, but now we are slave of our brain and working tirelessly to face altercation with our environment.

We have to know where the stopping point is. The much talked invention and innovation have to have some limit. And that limit should be defined by their usefulness in our ecosystem. Today millions of human being is involved in this mindless innovation in order to make human life much simpler. But this is resulting in making our life much complex and thrusting us to a kind of dark age where everything would be beyond our comprehension.  When nature shows its wrath, we are as helpless as those cave man of 12000 BC with more damage which could ever been inflicted in history of mankind. How technology has made it better. Instead of participating in mindless technological race (Google, Microsoft, IBM etc etc) why aren't we putting our energy into real human problem - the problem of disaster, suffering, poverty, population, habitat loss, species extintion, again the list is very long. 

I might sound like a doomsday predictor moron but we are at the juncture of falling into a dark pit from where it would be near impossible for human race to recover.  We have to say enough is enough. We have thought enough about our own comfort and development. We have achieved enough. Now it’s the time to think about those who have been constantly neglected in 10000 years history of mankind. Now it’s time to go back. Now it’s time to go back to nature and nurture it. We have graduated from the college of development long back and forgotten all our lessons. It’s time to go back to school to learn the basic.