...it is only in the last hundred years or so that our technology has advanced to the point where we can really fundamentally disrupt the balance created here by four and a half billion years of evolution...
This statement is so wrong I don't even know where to start.
For hundreds (if not thousands) of years humans have dramatically altered their natural environment by cultivating land, hunting various animals to extinction and selective breeding. However, evolution never achieved a "balance" for humans to disrupt. Evolution and "balance" are almost diametrically opposite. Are you under the impression that after 4 billion years of evolution, we finally reached a stable terminal point, only to be disrupted by naughty humans?
Hey, environmental destruction isn't something to take lightly. Spewing huge amounts of corrosive chemical pollution into the air as a byproduct of energy generation, irrevocably altering the environment, causing mass extinctions world-wide, all because of--eh? What? Humans? Oh, I thought we were talking about cyanobacteria.
Agreed, before we built cities we were cutting down forests for farmland. Before we built farms, we burnt down forests to create savannah to expand the grazing land so we could herd more cattle (yes, there was a disturbing trend 100,000's of years ago - up to about 1 million years ago - that wherever mankind lived, fire occurrence went through the roof)
People conveniently overlook our past whilst condemning our present.
I'm sorry to all those people who blindly don't see, but we are god. We aren't playing as this secular god, we have been it since long before we even acquired fire.
At our present point we can change the world in a heartbeat. If an ice age begins, we have the ability to produce vast quantities of green house gasses far more potent than CO2 or methane. Similarly, if the planet starts heating dramatically, we have the ability to release vast quantities of SO2 into the upper atmosphere and force the planet into a global dimming cycle like it was in between the 1960's-90's.
Similarly, with our construction of vast arrays of wind turbines there has been a noticeable decline in wind speeds in those areas. Incidentally, something many people have failed to remember from basic high school physics is that generators can act as motors and vice versa. If it ever came to it, we have the ability to change the direction of winds in localised areas.
There's even debate over whether we have the ability to cause the formation of rain (we invariably can heat+water, it just takes a lot more effort than the cloud seeding hocus pocus method), and scientists around the world regularly cause lightening.
Really, what do humans do that is not attributed to a god?
The whole point of this phrase is to give us pause as we consider how to use these massive powers. We clearly have the ability to effect these changes, but your seeming confidence in our ability to easily solve massive problems only reinforces how important our humility is.
Case in point, we accidentally dumped millions of gallons of oil into the ocean, causing a huge mess. One solution, has been using chemicals to disperse the oil, but now after trying that strategy for a bit, we are scaling back its use for fear of causing more problems. These systems we are trying to change a monstrously large and complicated and we don't understand them completely enough to be able to know the concequences of our actions. That is why we must be cautious when "playing God"
I mean, it is hard enough to change pieces of an OS without having unintended consequences, and that is a system entirely of our own creation.
Yes, everything is always changing. Yes, we have changed the environment we live in for a long time. But in the last hundred years the scale of those changes has increased dramatically. I'm not trying to argue that evolution had brought us to a single stable point, but rather to point out that evolution/natural selection/Nature had maintained a semblance of balance for eons that we only recently have acquired the power to radically disrupt. I agree that we have been changing things as a species for quite some time, but to me there is a big difference between killing all the Dodos on the planet and destroying entire costal ecosystems by releasing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean/breeding a super virus in our hospitals/releasing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
This statement is so wrong I don't even know where to start.
For hundreds (if not thousands) of years humans have dramatically altered their natural environment by cultivating land, hunting various animals to extinction and selective breeding. However, evolution never achieved a "balance" for humans to disrupt. Evolution and "balance" are almost diametrically opposite. Are you under the impression that after 4 billion years of evolution, we finally reached a stable terminal point, only to be disrupted by naughty humans?