<40,000 years from now, your descendents will look in vain to see what you thought, because the paper, the tape, the wires, the plastics, will have all turned to dust long before then, and the buildings crumbled away. He will conclude that you were a primitive brute.>
They will be right. I already think I'm a primitive brute. It's embarrassing being me. It bemuses me that people are so arrogant that they think they are made in the image of some supernatural deity of omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. They look to me like ugly, smelly, hairy beasts made of bucket chemistry, more akin to garden variety primates than some glorious deity. A kind of pig on two legs but with prehensile fingers. A cross between a chimpanzee and a pig.
They say that DNA, or maybe it's RNA, can comingle to form third parties. Maybe a chimp and a pig got married one day and that was the missing link. We've been discussing science. That hypothesis fits the facts. Now we need an experiment. Do you want to be the pig or the chimp? Any volunteers for the other?
A couple of decades ago, when taking a look back in time and taking a look around me then, I realized the same as you, that there is not a lot left.
Nature backfills and overgrows quite quickly. You might remember the 'environmental carnage' of Vietnam, which was supposed to last for 1000 years [or some silly long time]. I thought then that nature and human activity move pretty quickly. Go around Europe and you don't see much left of WWII. Same in Japan. You need to hunt down special sites which have been deliberately preserved, usually with effort spent on maintaining and even rebuilding the damaged state.
I decided that the two things left and therefore the two things worth creating were DNA and knowledge. The rest goes by the wayside, usually within one or two generations.
Even 99% of the DNA goes by the wayside too, every few generations. Which is a good thing otherwise we'd still look like nematode worms and wouldn't have the brains to come up with pig/chimp DNA blending experiments. The idea of which, I might add, is proof that some more improvement in brain DNA would be a good idea. The pig/chimp experiments might be worthwhile to perhaps find DNA combinations with high intelligence which have previously been missed.
You see, even though we have limited intelligence, we can bootstrap ourselves into a smarter state. If the pig/chimp process doesn't work, we can carry on with the semiconductor neural net cyberspace process which looks increasingly like a big brain under construction, which will at some stage become self-sustaining and adapting.
Google already knows more than I do and can remember it even faster and seems to have an excellent filing system and even seems able to think associatively, coming up with associated things when asking about something else. CDMA is making it all mobile.
Knowledge and DNA have been all that's left. But maybe even DNA is going the way of the dodo and pretty soon we'll have a cyberspace-based ethereal being which doesn't die, knows everything and is actually really smart.
"We'll have" is inaccurate and presumptuous too. That's a bit like chimps looking out from the zoo cage over the world [say they have CNN or something] and saying "Look what we've got now after a few thousand years of evolution". Which is sort of true in that they are fed on time, don't get lions and stuff trying to eat them and have somebody do their cleaning regularly, with free medical insurance. They have a cushy life. But it's not true from a power point of view - they aren't actually running the show, though their cousins George, Donald, Dick, Paul and co have aspirations to do so. John Kerry, Hu Jintao and I are competing with those PNAC chaps for 'running the show' rights. We all have male answer syndrome skills, so it's obvious that we should be in charge.
Being also a talented anthropologist, I can tell you that male answer syndrome is just alpha male dominance social climbing, but with less hair and mutual grooming. As the world shrinks to the size of a village, women are taking over the role of minding the 'fort', which isn't so much a fort as a collection of cottages. That's the traditional role of women, which is why they are coming to the fore.
Without a 'beyond the pale', a fort and bad guys 'out there' trying to steal our territory and girlz, a bloke looks sort of pathetic running around shouting "Bang! You're dead", pretending he's a real man. It's annoying to other people, frightens the horses, scares the children and irritates the women. The blokes need to get something more useful and manly to do.
Such as running pig/chimp experiments and getting cyberspace humming. We are on the case!
I realize my efforts will be forgotten. Even Globalstar's orbit will decay one day and the lights will blink out as the photovoltaic wings stop keeping the satellites aloft, powering their flight and radio processors. Already my offspring no longer crowd me for words of wisdom.
DNA and knowledge, that's all that's left. The rest goes back into the maw for the next great thing.
After a billion years of development, we are what it was all for. When I look around and see people drunk, smoking, fighting and doing pig/chimp experiments, I wonder if nature really knew what it was doing. Collective amnesia in 40,000 years might be quite deliberate - people like to find their ancestors are Kings and Great Inventors and Wonderful Writers, maybe even the Son of God. Most of us are, embarrassingly, merely the output of previous pig/chimp experiments conducted in a barnyard somewhere.
But hey, we're making progress. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Mqurice |
