Is our destiny to become gods or dodos?

In 1905 Albert Einstein looked at the hunter-gatherer concept - and then his imagination took him one step further. He viewed the period between two events as 'stuff' and wondered if it could be stretched. He concluded that it could be stretched - but if time stretched, then empty space (which he defined as the distance between two localities) had to shrink. Empty was also 'stuff'. Because his unimaginable idea was the truth, we now have (for better or worse) the reality of nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons.

But the vision of Einstein did not stop there, and in 1915 the maths which redefined gravity and put satellites into exact orbits also revealed the existence of the block universe. This is the concept that every event that has ever happened and every event that ever will happen, are here with us right now.

How receptive is your mind to the unimaginable? Is what is unimaginable not worth thinking about - even if our scientist-philosophers tell us that that is the direction we appear destined to be heading?

If Isaac Newton was to rise from the dead he would be stunned at the technology that surrounded him. He would be immensely pleased that the scientific method that he passionately believed in had proven itself in such a spectacular way. But if he hung around for a few days he would conclude that the age of enlightenment had been hijacked by one of the most powerful of human emotions - the desire to possess material objects or the minds of others.

He would notice that universities were no longer focused on producing classical scholars and natural philosophers who were gentle with the earth and the biosphere - but mostly financiers, traders and builders who misused scientific revelation to exploit and damage the earth and the biosphere. He would be astonished at the immense complexity of the economy. He would be dismayed to realise that it was increasingly owing its survival to the consumption of energy and material far in excess of what humans needed for their survival.

We have two competing perspectives leading to two different outcomes. Which will win out in the end? - the lateral thinking of pure science which courageously goes where lesser men dare not go, or the linear thinking of those who control the world's resources and who are driven by greed or fear?

Is our destiny to become gods, or are we to follow the path of the dodo? Even if we do discover all that there is to know, will we be able to rejoice in that achievement for the rest of time - or will all be lost in the destruction of the biosphere from which we evolved?