Nature's challenge

Nothing is more oppressive than nature. We as humans spend a lot of time trying to correct the wrongs of others. We want to see justice and ensure fairness, so we have laws and things like that. This is a noble pursuit, BUT we spend far less time trying to decouple ourselves from the oppression of nature. We try really hard to correct human oppression, trying to keep people from doing horrible things to others to the best of our ability, but we spend a lot less time than we should trying to solve problems imposed upon us by nature.

Nature just is, and sometimes the way nature is, is very very damaging for us. I would argue that nothing is more oppressive than nature, and the problems that nature imposes upon us are far more difficult to solve than human problems, but far more worthy of solving. The reason we don’t spend as much time as we should on this, is because it doesn’t have the emotional weight of a human problem. When a person is doing bad things, it incites anger in many people, and they rally to solve that problem. Natural events, on the other hand, just “happen”. There’s no one to be angry with, so there isn’t the emotional motivation to solve the problem.

We need to overcome this dismissal of nature, and solve some of natures most pressing problems, like asteroids and cancer. The good thing about solving natural problems, is that there is no real enemy, and all of humanity can therefore come together to solve the problem together. In a sense, the problems of nature can be unifying for us in our attempts to solve them. As an example, we humans have the ability to prevent an asteroid the size of that which killed the dinosaurs from ever hitting the planet. If we detected it early enough, we could develop a technological solution which would steer it off course and prevented the collision entirely.

These sorts of problems that don’t have any emotional weight, but do have seriously grave consequences are the most worthwhile problems to solve. An asteroid has no evil intent. An asteroid can’t trigger us emotionally. But an asteroid can easily destroy all human life.