God Grant me the Serenity

God Grant me the serenity to know what is useful and good to change. At the present state of human evolution we are beginning to reach a place where almost any physical thing can be changed into some other physical thing. Is that Good? Well, yes and no. And there's the rub. Who among us is wise enough to make these choices? Well, not usually the ones actually making these choices. And there's the real problem right there. The people making choices about what kinds of lives are possible for all life forms presently inhabiting earth are the wrong people and the wrong beings to be making these choices.

What I mean by this is that although they might be intellectually intelligent they don't tend to be by any definition wise or even visionaries or prescient. There is an interesting custom that I studied while studying cultural anthropology. In some of the tribes of people on earth no artifice or device was allowed to be used or made until all the elders of the tribe looked at the device and tried to think of every good and bad possibility for that artifice or device that it could be used for unto the 7th generation forward. Unless the good to the tribe of any invention or device absolutely and completely outweighed any possible bad to the tribe from that device(unto the 7th generation of tribe members) the device was forbidden by the elders to be used on pain of death by any member of the tribe.

I think we are at a point in human evolution where something like this is necessary so we as a species don't just innovate and invent ourselves into extinction.