Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Adams imagines a future in which scientific progress so amplifies human power that it outstrips moral and political restraint. The line treats “science” not as inherently evil but as a force multiplier: once knowledge yields world-destroying technology, the species gains the unprecedented capacity for collective self-annihilation. The phrasing “commit suicide” frames catastrophe as an act of agency rather than fate—an indictment of human shortsightedness and the fragility of civilization when destructive capability becomes easy to deploy. Read in hindsight, it anticipates twentieth-century anxieties about total war and weapons of mass destruction, and it fits Adams’s broader skepticism about modernity’s accelerating energies and the instability they introduce into historical life.