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In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke ask a subtle question: Are our tools controlling us?

It's an important question. The major factor that separates us from the rest of the animals is that human beings make and use tools.

We can't run as fast as a horse, but we invented the wheel and harnessed horses to pull our chariots. Later we developed horseless carriages.

We can't fly like a bird, but eventually Orville and Wilber Wright invented the airplane, and now we have planes that fly at three times the speed of sound and reach altitudes of 60,000 feet and more.

We need oxygen to breathe. Yet we have built vehicles that have taken us to deepest ocean trenches and to the airless, pockmarked surface of the Moon.

You get the picture. The human way of dealing with problems is to build and use tools. From the invention of the wheel to the latest gas-guzzling Humvee, from painting pictures on cave walls to the latest iPod, we invent tools to handle the problems we face.

But have we gone too far? Are we becoming prisoners of our own success? Are we using the tools or are the tools using us?

Let's back up a bit.

Twenty thousand years ago, Ice Age hunters didn't worry that the smoke from their campfires would pollute the atmosphere. Or that the carbon dioxide released by burning wood would cause global greenhouse warming. Or, for that matter, that urinating into a brook would pollute the water. There weren't enough human beings on Earth 20,000 years ago to make much of a dent in the global environment.

Yet the fossil record clearly shows that wherever humans went, big meat animals swiftly disappeared, hunted into extinction in a matter of a few centuries. The Americas teemed with woolly mammoths, giant sloths, and other large game — before human tribes crossed the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that existed back in those days. Humans invaded America and the big meat animals were soon wiped out.

The same thing has happened more recently in islands of the Pacific, such as New Zealand. Humans in, big game out; driven into extinction within a few human generations.

There have been times, long before humans arose on Earth, when enormous natural catastrophes have erased most of the species living on our planet. The most famous of these extinction events is the "Time of Great Dying," about 65 million years ago, when a giant meteor impact led to the extinction of half the creatures on land and sea, including the mighty dinosaurs.

Earlier extinction events have been uncovered. About 250 million years ago a natural cataclysm (perhaps another meteor strike, perhaps not) wiped out more than 90 percent of all the species living at that time.

Today the Earth is suffering through another extinction event. Species are being wiped out by the thousands each year. By us. Human activities are driving one species after another into obliteration. We don't notice this because by and large the species that are dying off don't directly impact our western society. They are bugs and birds, frogs and fish, for the most part.

But gorillas and elephants are being pushed toward extinction, too. Why? Because human beings are pushing into the territories where they live, cutting and burning down forests to make room for more farmland. And hunting down "monkey meat" to feed their hungry families.

Here in Florida we see a manifestation of this growing global calamity. Wetlands are turned into housing developments and shopping malls. Natural habitats are paved over with concrete. Native species such as the Florida panther are on the verge of extinction. (Too bad we're not doing the same to the mosquito and cockroach.)

We try to protect endangered species, of course. We proudly proclaim that the bald eagle and the manatee are no longer "endangered," they're merely "threatened." Whoopee!

Meanwhile the growth of human numbers is overwhelming most of the animal species with whom we share this planet.

The campfires of those Ice Age hunters have evolved into the hundreds of millions of automobile exhaust pipes, factory smokestacks, chimneys, etc. of our modern industrial age. The pollutants and greenhouse gases that we belch into the atmosphere are having real, measurable, and harmful effects on our global environment.

There are more than six billion human beings on Earth today. Although population growth is slowing in the industrialized nations, it is still growing furiously in the poorer parts of the world. Archaic religious attitudes encourage the poor to have large families, adding to the problem.

At our current population level the human race is altering the world's climate and wiping out other forms of life at an alarming rate.

What is the solution? How can we make ourselves live in better harmony with this planet we inhabit?

One way would be to halt and even reverse population growth. If you know a way to do that that doesn't involve either genocide or dictatorial control of family sizes, I'd like to hear about it.

A better way, I think, is to do what humans have always done: invent new tools to solve the problem. We need ways to generate energy that don't pollute the environment. We need ways to increase the world's food supply — or better, ways to distribute the food supply more equitably.

Or we can continue to allow things to go as they're going now. That will solve the problem, too. There will be, inevitably, a global catastrophe: perhaps a nuclear war, perhaps an unstoppable pandemic, perhaps a brutal shift in the global climate.

The human race will not be wiped out, most likely. Maybe only nine-tenths of us will die off. Maybe that will be enough, if the survivors learn better. Of course, there's always the chance of another meteor strike.

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 books, including his latest novel, TITAN. Dr. Bova's web site address is www.benbova.com.