For most of history, people begged the gods to spare them famine, plague, and war. Today, those disasters still exist, but they look less like fate and more like problems—errors of politics, logistics, and bad decisions.
That shift changes ambition. If death can be postponed, suffering reduced, and violence managed, the next goals become bolder: stretch life, upgrade happiness, and pursue forms of “divinity” through biology and code.
Yet the more solvable life becomes, the more it turns into a project with managers, budgets, and metrics. The question stops being “Why are we here?” and becomes “What should we optimize?”
Once humans aim to redesign themselves, the story of power begins with a darker fact: we already redesigned the planet.