'The whole purpose of human existence is to avoid pain and have fun, and I can’t think of anything that’s more fun than learning "---new things, making pretty things, and sharing them with the people we love."

How much of our energy is spent on weapons and armies instead of ways to have fun, "making pretty things and sharing them with the people we love"?

The test is what have we done with our excess capacity? How much good has our curious nature brought us?

I agree we are stuck with it, and the push to know more and more is irresistible, and I don't think it's going to do the species much good. Just for one, the internal combustion engine will disrupt our societies beyond belief and quite possibly either directly or indirectly lead to the extinction of our species.

Face it, we do not have the wisdom to handle the fruits of our excess intellectual capacity. We have atomic power, which is used to generate excess heat, radioactive waste, bombs, more bombs, and the possibility of dirty bombs. We get some benefit, at the risk of extermination. Not worth it.

We have an Earth to which we have evolved. The fruits of our excess capacity is rendering it uninhabitable. If we can't keep the planet to which we've adapted for millions of years habitable, we certainly can't make an inhospitable world habitable. That technology is another waste, when the energy could be used to make this place worth living in. There's a false hope, spawned by excess intellectual capacity, which will suck up more of a limited treasure.

And don't misunderstand - I don't think a thing will change. We're hellbent on our own destruction. And it's due to our nature, built-in, inevitable.

Technology is cumulative, and the necessary wisdom to use it constructively must be learned by each individual. And that happens only rarely.