Mankind - R.I.P.

I want to be the man standing atop the hill when the next sentient being emerges from the fog of evolution. I want to show that being all of the reasons why the great human experiment failed.

Laugh. Go ahead. Think it won't happen. But this can only be thought for two reasons. If you are religious you believe that God will come back and whisk you away on a magic carpet to your personal version of nirvana. Good luck with that! Or, like many, you believe that mankind can think its way out of the trouble it has created. That flies in the face of history. The Anasazi, the Maya, and the Incas couldn't do it. Nor could countless other civilizations. And today, our toys of destruction are bigger and badder than they ever could have envisioned.

At one point the Anasazi had a beautiful society. They built wonderful structures, made artistic pottery and traded with their neighbors for much needed supplies. But the Anasazi, builders of six-story buildings nearly a thousand years ago, destroyed their environment. They exhausted their supply of wood to build with and ruined their fields for the production of food. Eventually, those that remained either dispersed or killed each other over the few remaining resources. The story of the Anasazi is not unique. As I said, history is littered with them.

So how are we any different from those civilizations that perished before ours? Or more importantly, have we progressed in any significant ways that would prevent our demise?

Today, given our interconnectedness, if we fail, we do so as a species. Globalization means that we are all dependent upon each other. Your war is now my war. Your pollution is now my pollution. Korean weapons of war are now at my doorstep - even though they are half a world away. It doesn't matter that they may never explode near the North American continent. Their exploding anywhere in the world would surely have an effect on my environment.

Our environment - that which sustains us and gives us life - has never been under more attack. Pesticides, over-fishing, waste - the list is endless. But our species has even greater problems than waste and environmental overload. At the pinnacle of our stupidity is our continued reliance on religious beliefs. We hate each other more now than at any time in history because still, after all of our progresses, our Gods can't play together as well as a group of four year olds. The problem, of course, is that we no longer bury our swords into our enemy's chest, or fire a bullet into his heart. Today we drop bombs that are felt across the globe in an instant. Those bombs, which will surely fall for religious reasons with the stain of God painted on their sides, won't kill us. Not all of us. But they will destroy the planet and eventually the planet will have its revenge and destroy us.

Where, then, have we progressed in our understanding of the world and each other that would convince us to believe we have a future that stretches farther forward than backward? The simple answer is we haven't. Sure our technology is better. But that has only meant that we can liquidate our resources and poison our world at unprecedented levels. We grow more food than ever before from smaller and smaller plots of land. But by 2050 the population level is expected to exceed nine billion. Propagation of the species is a product of biological encoding, but to what end if it is also our demise. Do we really need more and more mouths to feed? Is that in the species' best interest at this point?

Can we really say that we understand each other more today than in the past? When religious hatred is running rampant around the planet is it possible to make that assertion given the abundance of facts to the contrary? Dar-fur: 500,000 plus dead. Iraq: 500,000 plus dead. Got a calculator? When people in the U.S. can make the claim that gays are immoral and don't deserve the same basic human rights and freedoms as the rest of us - and keep their highly paid public jobs! - how can we say we have progressed?

Standing on top of that hill awaiting the arrival of the universe's next great experiment to emerge from the evolutionary fog what should I say? If their development goes anything like ours there is nothing that can be said. For you know they would sooner turn me into a God and fight over the semantics of what I said than they would actually put into practice the warnings they were gifted. You know their arrogance would feed their greed.  Perhaps it would be best just to observe, quietly, in the shadows and out of the way. Maybe their own inclinations won't be as destructive as ours. Maybe, just maybe, they will be the experiment that succeeds.

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