On technology, consciousness, and who gets to decide what the future looks like
Space debris and spirituality live in wildly different neighborhoods of the human experience, yet they keep waving at each other across the cosmic street more so than ever.
One is literal junk orbiting Earth: dead satellites, broken rocket parts, flecks of paint traveling faster than bullets. The other asks questions like: Why are we here? What is consciousness? What do we owe each other? These questions are often ask from astronauts coming back down to earth having had an awakening moment form their vintage point.
Yet when you place allk of these side by side, a strange philosophical mirror appears.
Many spiritual traditions teach that humans accumulate residue — unresolved emotions, trauma, ego, distraction, unfinished cycles. Space debris is the physical version of that. And you don’t need to look that far up. Right here, down on earth, under the surface, into the deepest water corners, trash, residues, and more can be found. Humanity launches magnificent dreams into the heavens, then leaves fragments spinning endlessly around the planet, conveniently tucked under the proverbial rug, away from eyesight — tiny ghosts of ambition that circle a world still figuring out what it wants to be. As long as we don’t see it, it doesn’t exist, right?
Not so fast, Grasshoper. Now this becomes a metaphor. What do we leave behind after every action? Not just materially, but emotionally and spiritually. A Buddhist lens calls it attachment. A Jungian lens calls it the shadow. A sci-fi poet might call it the clutter of a species learning faster than it matures.
The Overview Effect — and What It Costs
Astronauts often describe something called the Overview Effect mentioned above. Looking down at Earth from orbit changes them profoundly. Borders vanish. Conflict seems absurd. Earth appears fragile and luminous, like a floating lantern drifting through black water.
Yet orbit is increasingly crowded with debris. That contrast hits hard: breathtaking unity alongside evidence of human carelessness. Space walks have become exponentially more dangerous then they were 50 years ago mimicking the earth laden trash left behind for future generations to deal with.
Ancient cultures looked at the night sky with reverence. The felt stars were ancestors, gods, navigation systems, prophecy maps, sacred stories. At the very least, they looked up in wonder and asked what could be learned from the majestic orchestra. Now the skies contain internet satellites, military hardware, and debris fields. It is becoming a highway for trillionaires to colonize another place and continue to do the same. Some call this a loss of enchantment. Others call it evolution. Others yet smile and feel a scenario all too familiar written a long time ago. But there is another angle: humanity has entered the heavens physically, just not yet spiritually. Like children inheriting a cathedral and turning part of it into a storage shed a few come back from the great heights in awe and wonder.
This is the haunting question at the heart of every serious spiritual tradition today: Can a species become technologically advanced without becoming emotionally and spiritually evolved?
History suggests the answer is yes, although maneuvering through trouble waters pushing it to persevere — and that the consequences follow.
The Graduation Booing That Said Something True
This past spring, at several US college commencements, something unusual happened. Speakers were booed after mentioning artificial intelligence, AI.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was interrupted at the University of Arizona. Gloria Caulfield was booed at the University of Central Florida. Scott Borchetta drew the same reaction at Middle Tennessee State. Each was saying, in different words, that AI is coming for every field and every career.
The graduates heard something different. They heard: the work you trained for may already be changing before you get hired.
Today the numbers are starting to unveil that prophesy. That fear is legitimate. Entry-level work is where people learn to write, research, analyze, and make sound decisions. Those are the tasks AI can now help produce faster and cheaper. Junior work is where standards, context, judgment, and accountability get built. A company can save time and quietly damage the way an entire generation learns to think professionally.
Gallup‘s recent research on Gen Z tells the story clearly. A steady 51% of Gen Z use generative AI at least weekly. But familiarity has not produced confidence. Excitement has fallen to 22%. Hopefulness has fallen to 18%. Anger has risen to 31%. Anxiety sits at 42%. And 48% of employed Gen Z workers say the risks of AI at work outweigh the benefits. Only 15% say the opposite.
These students were not booing technology. They were booing the announcement that their futures had already been decided for them — by people who would profitThe Wholistic Center wholistic campfire, The Wholistic Center, All Rights Reserved 2026-2030 from that decision. They were booing the business practices that have become obvious, crass, and crude.
The Hitman Playbook
John Perkins spent years as what he called an “economic hit man” — someone whose job was to convince developing nations to take on enormous debt for infrastructure projects that primarily served American corporate and geopolitical interests. The formula was always the same: declare something inevitable, frame resistance as backwardness, move money to the top, and leave the population holding the costs. If all fails, send in the jackals to remove the offending parties. Chilling…
The pattern is worth naming when you see it applied elsewhere.
When the most powerful technology companies on Earth declare AI “the next industrial revolution” at graduation ceremonies, in congressional hearings, and in every media outlet simultaneously — before the technology has been independently evaluated, before its labor effects are understood, before its concentrations of power have been examined, before they even earn a profit — the hot investment potato is thrown around leaving many asking: Who benefits from the inevitability narrative? And who is being asked to simply accept it?
I have spent twenty years in advanced mobility technology. Twelve of those years covering electric aviation specifically. I watched for a decade as urban air mobility was declared the imminent future — investment flowed, announcements piled up, and the coverage obligingly reported each one as if flight operations were around the corner. Many of those companies are gone and a healthy number survived. The ones that survived did so by quietly abandoning the grand narrative and solving real, specific, smaller problems.
AAM has barely arrived. And already we are being told AI is the next next thing. We can only imagine what quantum computing will do once the AI bubble bursts. Stay tuned…
The speed at which new technologies get declared inevitable — before they have proven their social value, before their costs have been distributed fairly, before anyone has asked who controls this — is not organic. It is artificially engineered. And the engineering serves specific interests that are not yours.
What Ancient Wisdom Said First
Spiritual traditions that have survived centuries did not survive because they were comforting. They survived because they asked the questions that power structures prefer to leave unasked. Those question to go within, not seek outside.
Who benefits? Who decides? What are we creating, and at what cost to what we already have?
The Vedic traditions spoke of maya — the illusion that what we can measure and manufacture is more real than what we cannot. The Tao Te Ching warned against the ruler who imposes complexity where simplicity would serve and men left to their own devise do well. Indigenous traditions across every continent embedded the same caution into their cosmologies: that a people who lose their relationship with the living world — who trade reverence for extraction — eventually consume themselves. Ethnologist coming back from Amazonian tribes that had a very limited encounters with our civilized world marveled at how young kids were so mature, came to speak with elders, and held their own not in an arrogant superficial way, but with measured through-out questions and point. They were part of society, not pacified children with gimmick toys.
These were not pre-modern superstitions. They were hard-won observations about how civilizations fail. Millennia of observations and practice distilled into a woven wisdom fabric of society. This has been replaced, albeit temporarily, with modern day distraction that ultimately do not satisfy human thirst and hunger for knowledge. And that knowledge creeps back into our focus under the guise of ancient wisdom available to us now.
Technology is not the enemy of that wisdom. It never was. It has always been part of evolving societies. It has its place. The problem is technology detached from consciousness — capability in service of accumulation rather than flourishing, deployed by the few, experienced as imposition by the many. Technology used without asking why and what purpose does it serve for me is an open door to manipulations and modern day slavery.
There is also a poetic idea that nothing truly disappears. Debris remains in orbit for decades, sometimes centuries. Actions linger. Consequences circle back. Spiritually, this resembles karmic thinking: what we create continues moving, what we neglect keeps affecting others, and every launch eventually carries a return path. All of these are exemplified countless time in ancient texts and practices.
Humanity now has to actively clean the orbital environment it created despite decades of warning. Profit primed over common sense. There is something mythic in that — a civilization being asked to clear its own psychic attic as we have to now clean hundreds of years of earthly trash under the rug polluting our water, air, and soil.
The Question Worth Asking
True human evolution — technical and spiritual — cannot be directed by a handful of economic actors serving their own accumulation. It cannot be declared from a podium at a graduation ceremony and handed to twenty-two-year-olds as an accomplished fact.
The graduates who booed were not being anti-technology. They were being appropriately skeptical of how power has been used against them. That skepticism is a spiritual act, a reawakening of sorts. an acknowledgement that things haven’t panned out as expected or told they would. It is the refusal to be rendered passive in the face of a narrative designed to make passivity feel like wisdom while a hand few enjoy the hard labor of others. Where have we seen this before? Revolutions never end well.
The real question — the one ancient traditions kept asking and that The Wholistic Center exists to keep alive — is not can we do this? Technology has always answered that question eventually. The real question is: Who are we becoming in the process? And are we choosing that, or is it being chosen for us?
Orbit is filled with abandoned ambitions circling a blue world that still has not decided what kind of civilization it wants to become.
Like humanity itself: beautiful, inventive, brilliant — and leaving fingerprints everywhere.
The work of conscious evolution is not to stop the launches. It is to become the kind of people who consider, before each one, what we intend to leave behind.
Nicolas Zart has spent twenty years at the intersection of advanced technology and its human implications, twelve of them inside the electric aviation industry. TheWholisticCenter.com explores what ancient wisdom still has to say to a civilization in a hurry.