To give some humility, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years as a species and for most of that time we could not have done what you've stated abo

To give some humility, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years as a species and for most of that time we could not have done what you've stated above. Farming, cities, animal husbandry, etc. are very very new for homo sapiens. You really can't use "thing humans do in modern times" as an indicator of the superiority of humans. For a start no individual human could do something like build an industrial process for exploitation anymore than an individual termite could build a city since no individual has all the knowledge required nor could they build that knowledge from scratch. If all it took was a singular individual and not a collective we would have achieved this much sooner in our history. Your aphid example is much closer to how humanity operates than you give it credit.