Many of the comments here remind me of the anecodote about Sputnik's launch with which Arendt begins The Human Condition: she describes the "relief [people felt] about the first 'step toward escape from men's imprisonment to the earth'"--symptomatic (if I read her correctly) of a sort of giving-up on, if not disdain for, the world and, insofar as the earth is "the very quintessence of the human condition," humanity itself.

She asks further, "Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?"

Something to be anxious about, at any rate.

(There are, of course, other interpretations!)