The process of distancing man from nature was inaugurated a very long time ago, perhaps when he invented fire, or even before that, when he invented the first tools. The speed at which humans have extracted themselves from nature has been exponential: very slowly for millennia; more rapidly from the invention of historical memory by the great Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations… which thus gave themselves the means to accumulate experience; increasingly rapidly since the great discoveries of the 15th century, which began to cross cultures and civilisations and question certainties; the second last acceleration occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people stopped being satisfied with what nature produced on the surface and started to attack what was underneath: minerals, coal, oil… This stage is important because it marks the changeover from the era of progress conceived as the optimisation of nature’s gifts: from the 19th century onwards, we began to emancipate ourselves from nature by exploiting its minerals, previously considered sterile, even to the detriment of its fertile part (animal and vegetable). It is not by chance that Nietzsche’s theory of the superhuman dates from the 19th century, for it was at this time that humans began to see themselves as Gods modelling the world in their own image.