Walt, all the ideas you express in this piece resonate with me. Humanity is an experiment of Nature to see what happens when creatures have more powerful minds, and the outcome of the experiment seem beyond us. The things you bring up we need to ponder, if we are to control our fate.

That said, I'm not sure we truly control our fate. Despite our imaginations, much of our behavior is driven by our genetic programming. It seems we will do what we do, as if no consequences existed, just like our fellow animals, like an invasive species taking over an ecosystem, displacing other life, until lack of food or a catastrophe reduces or eliminates their numbers.

Reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" made me think about how all life depends on surrounding conditions for survival. People plant lawns. If they water them, they grow. If not, they die. I feel we are in the grip of some set of mechanisms like that. Even though our inventiveness is one member of the set, it might not save us in every scenario.