Home > Insight

Small step for man, giant leap to ruin

It will come to me, surely, but at present I cannot say that I have the faintest idea about what I intended to write. And it doesn’t matter either, as far as I’m concerned. I cannot seem to stray far enough in my thoughts from the effusively unnatural light of this laptop screen, which is glowing before my eyes like a small pocket of brilliant radiation.

The intense glow is disagreeable at best, and anyone who writes anything knows that it’s a bona fide downer to set out in a deluge of negative thoughts about the surface upon which the writing is being done. Situations like this have the potential to completely change the very premise of things.

I know this to be true, but I am not afraid of it. I understand what is going on here, and I am willing to ride it out.

To be sure, though, it is not negative, necessarily speaking, that creatures descended from very simple microbial organisms, or even God for that matter, could develop the faculty to produce something like a computer. That is incredible.

Indeed, all of my displeasure at being face-to-face with this glow is amplified by strange forces inside my head, and I realize this fact. But my mastery of mind-over-matter thought techniques is presently at odds with the concept of the ever changing world we live in.

And such as it is, one cannot complain much and expect to be on point. The world will move on and shift into new and innovative forms of expression regardless of who is along for the ride. Constant evolution without the possibility of perfection, it is Mother Nature’s game that we are playing, and she is our dungeon master.

Technology must advance in one direction or another. The insatiable urge to find out what is possible cannot simply be overcome by hiding in the woods and mailing weird essays and bombs to people who fit the mold. The future is real, and it is on its way. Anyone who doesn’t prepare for it will be worse for their negligence.

And nobody can quite say what the future holds either. Well death, presumably, especially when one takes into account the strange reality that God, or whatever else might be held responsible, seems to have misplaced basic skills in discretion when virtues were being arranged in the human mind. Essentially, if God created anything then he or she or it is responsible for anything and everything that those creations do. Which includes the sort of out-of-control expansion of human technological capacity. We live in an interesting paradox. Our lack of discretion with regard to what is possible by way of our own ingenuity is appallingly discreditable. And, if a creator is watching, it is naturally its own fault that we seem destined to destroy everything within our reach. But under the more likely circumstance that the creator is a myth, the fault belongs squarely in the resourceful hands that Mother Nature has given to us.

But addiction is a powerful obstacle, and our species seems to have an inherent compulsion to build and improve. Whether we are keeping with the times or creating them as we go is not easily recognized.

Whatever the case may be, it is inconsequential to fret over whether or not the things we do are good or bad. In reality, if what our species does to itself and the environment is too detrimental, we shall see the effects of our actions manifested against us in apocalyptic fashion. This is something we can be sure about.

Anyone who disagrees with the course humanity is running can take serious consideration into the verity that there is simply no way that an organism can survive if it consistently works to destroy itself.

Of course, there are many people in the world who disagree with the status quo of things, but who still would opt to survive and allow their children to live in a healthy environment. But those people are dreamers and talkers. Every generation of mankind has held a similar motive in their collective mind, but none of them really do anything extraordinarily productive to ensure the health and prosperity of what are still imaginary people. It is high time that we as a species accept the fact that we are incredibly inept.

Building computers, colonizing the planet, exploring our immediate galactic neighborhood and et cetera are all very interesting accomplishments for hominids. But no accomplishment, technological or otherwise, is worthy of praise when we as a species will not even work to ensure our own future if it is going to cost more than what our profit margins will allow.

I have no serious quarrel with my computer screen, as far as I can tell, but it seems essential that humanity be subject to an intervention. We are rapidly building the device of our own ruin.