#progress trap

The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our movable feasts.

[S]pecialists ... "people who know more and more about less and less, until they know all about nothing." Many animals are highly specialized, their bodies adapted to specific ecological niches and ways of life. Specialization brings short-term rewards but can lead, in the long run, to an evolutionary dead end. When the prey of the sabre-toothed cat died out, so did the cat. The modern human animal — our physical being — is a generalist. We have no fangs, claws, or venom built into our bodies. Instead we've devised tools and weapons — knives, spearheads, poisoned arrows. .... Our specialization is the brain. The flexibility of the brain's interactions with nature, through culture, has been the key to our success. Cultures can adapt far more quickly than genes to new threats and needs. But .... there is still a risk. As cultures grow more elaborate, and technologies more powerful, they themselves may become ponderous specializations — vulnerable and, in extreme cases, deadly. The atomic bomb, a logical progression from the arrow and the bullet, became the first technology to threaten our whole species with extinction. ... A "progress trap"

Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. A seductive trail of success may end in a trap. Take weapons, for example. Ever since the Chinese invented gunpowder, there has been great progress in the making of bangs: from the firecracker to the cannon, from the petard to the high explosive shell. And just when high explosives were reaching a state of perfection, progress found the infinitely bigger band in the atom. But when the bang we can make blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress. ..... President Kennedy [on nuclear weapons] said, "If mankind does not put an end to war, war will put an end to mankind"

all I wanted was a million dollars, and a round trip ticket to heaven, then i found it was full of cockroaches, Nazis, and the hijackers from 9/11