Shaping Our World Through Technology

 To what extent do we create the “worlds” we live in?  To what extent do we shape and manipulate the world?

Highways, iPhones, and fracking.  These are just a few of the ways we significantly shape the world around us.  The human race has shaped the world for as long as we have inhabited, by making it better suited for our optimal lifestyle and comfort.  We innovate the world for our benefit, and we do so by inventing things like cars which helps us travel with more comfort and ease as well as less stress on the body.  Evidently, technology plays if not the biggest, one of the biggest roles in human's shaping of our world.  

Technology is a major way we have shaped our world, especially in the past 15 years.  Since the late 90s, we have made unbelievable progress in what we are able to achieve with technology.  For instance, we have factories that barely require humans to be on hand.  A major way that technology has physically shaped the world are highways.  The length of all interstate highways is 47,182 miles.  To put that in perspective, there are more miles of interstate highways than square miles in the state of Pennsylvania.  We have shaped vast amounts of land to fit our needs, and in doing so play a major role in creating our world. 

Another example of our shaping the world via technology is cellphones.  Cellphones are a part of our world as much as water is a part of world.  We use the everyday to easily contact our family or friends.  We invented them to make communication easier, more portable, and more accessible.  Some phones even play a major role in culture, such as the iPhone, which you see in just about every magazine and on many billboards.  The physical impact of the cellphone is satellites.  We have launched satellites into orbit around the earth in order to make the use of cellphones possible.  Obviously these are not natural satellites, so this is yet another example of us shaping the world and making it better suited for our needs.

Technology plays a major role in the shaping of our political world as well.  The best example of this is the atom bomb.  We have the power to blow up an entire city in a matter of seconds, and because of this, countries have to try to keep harmony in our political world.  It has become evident that countries with weapons of mass destruction, such as the atom bomb, have more political power than those who do not.  This leads to many countries having to rethink their priorities in order to not upset those with these weapons.  In the past we have use atom bombs to end wars in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and since then we have never had to use the bomb, and hopefully it can stay that way.  A nuclear war would obviously, although not in a beneficial way shape our world.  We have the power to shape our world, even if it is not in a good way.

Humans play an undeniably large role in how our world is.  Although some of these are not good for the planet itself, such as fracking, we are able to make the world better for us.  As evident by climate change, we may need to scale back a bit in terms of changing the world through technological advancements, or better yet, focus them on helping the environment.