No, technology doesn't beat geography

Tectonic texture
Las Vegas, NV
November 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Rocketing through the atmosphere at nearly the speed of sound, it's easy to assume we've conquered the Earth, that our technological prowess has allowed us to beat down geography and render it irrelevant in our quest to go where we want, when we want, and do whatever we want when we get there.

To a large extent, that is indeed true. Technology lets us pretend that the real world is something Out There. We know it exists, but it hardly touches our day-to-day lives, and is easy to ignore if we so wish.

Fair enough. But what if we take the mega-sophisticated airplane out of the picture, along with all the other doodads of modern life? What if, by some bizarro miracle, we were left to our own devices in the hostile-but-impossibly-gorgeous desert below?

I'm guessing we wouldn't be so dominant, as we seem to think we are from our perspective so far above and/or removed from the rough and tumble of life on our planet. Standing on one of those craggy rock surfaces you see here, it's safe to say we would probably no longer be the modern giants we thought we were. More immediately, I doubt any of us would have the wherewithal to get much of anything done down there, let alone survive and thrive as we might in our traditional urban environments.

I'm hardly the first person to ponder the state of humanity from a window seat 7 miles above the planet. So be it. But as I tossed those thoughts around my brain, I found myself wondering why humans are so arrogant to begin with, and why more of us can't simply respect the universe around us for what it is, without feeling like we need to conquer it in some way. I fail to understand why "conquering nature" is such a cornerstone of the modern human experience.

I'm pretty sure we'd lose any battle against the elements if we were forced to leave our vaunted iPhones behind. I'm not sure why we have to think of it as a battle in the first place.

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