When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the significant environmental impact humans have had on ecosystems since their arrival in Australia.
Harari's quote reflects on the profound influence of human activity on the planet's ecosystems, using the example of the extinction of large animals in Australia as a case study. It suggests that the arrival of Homo sapiens marked a turning point in the natural balance, initiating a series of ecological changes that have continued to alter the Earth's biodiversity and environmental health over millennia.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech on environmental awareness and conservation.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
We've all been sick; we're all afraid of infection. I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it's important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.
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