The Universe In A Nutshell Quote Analysis

Earth is a vast space of over 197 million acres which the human race calls home. Many would like to imagine that we, mankind, are the absolute and sole reason for earth’s existence considering our ability to “dominate the world and have an exponentially increasing population” (Hawking) but those people lie to themselves. This planet we call home is 4.7 billion years old; 4.698 billion years older than the Homo sapien! The human race has only been in existence for a mere 0.04% of Earth’s history. With that short time on this planet though, the human race has single handedly caused the rate of species extinction to increase 1000 times over, possibly the biggest piece of evidence for the negative effect mankind has had on nature. In Mark Kurlansky’s and Wendell Berry’s quotes they take stances on the human race’s effect on our world and nature. Stephen Hawking’s book, The Universe in a Nutshell, addresses some of these same problems referenced in Kurlansky’s and Berry’s quotes and goes on to simplify the problem

Hawking, a world renowned physicist, theorist, and scientist, claims that the human race, though incredible, has yet to plateau and still requires evolution to better themselves, and because of that, Hawking inherently takes affirmative stances on Kurlansky’s observations, but disagrees with Berry’s observations. Mark Kurlansky asserts that man has come to think they are superior to nature and its natural selection but wrong because nature is simply using man as its pragmatic tool to create resilient species with adaptations to surpass humans’ abilities. Hawking agrees that humans, though “free to explore the whole Universe” with “our minds” (Hawking), are bound by nature’s doing, but also goes on to acknowledge that “the human race needs to improve its mental and physical qualities if it's to deal with the increasingly