[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe …Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe …and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view–i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.