Bingowings said:
If we are capable of turning the greed for food and mates into a greed for lumps of metal and rocks we can also turn it into greed for compassion and progress.
A noble thought but realistically I just do not see how you would make a human see profit in compassion. Even if you could accomplish that on a group of humans it would just make them more exploitable by other humans. So unless you did it on the entire mankind it would be a failure.