One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms. - Stephen Baxter

You can observe for yourself the degradation of the air and water around us. The earth has a limited capacity to absorb the waste products of human industry, and with enough development, the planet could even be rendered uninhabitable.

“You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?”
But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.

I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!