"Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven." -E.M. Forster (1909).
Quite the species, we humans. Nary can I think of another so eager to destroy itself. And aren't we effective? In fact, we have professions whose sole purpose is to destroy fellow man, though we use our political sanctions so that we might title them with euphemisms. And how effective we are to destroy our own environment. Never at any point in history has it been so simple. Instead of actually committing to a search for extracting renewable energy sources, we instead decide to claim that Armageddon is near when gas prices are high, yet claim that nothing is wrong when gas prices are low. We live in a system of neverending reactiveness, wondering why we've made the same mistakes again and again. We question the things we don't understand only to the extent that our mental voids be explained by belief and not by testable knowledge. Human ignorance has never been bliss, though we'll take it any way we can. Perhaps E.M Forster was right all along.
Predicted by Forster's short novel
The Machine Stops, humankind continues to destroy itself by ruining the environment such that the human race can only survive by living underground via a system of interconnected tubes and standardized cells that span the world. Humans' every physical and spiritual need is met by the omnipitent machine; from which we live, for which we live. Having all needs superfically met by the machine, humans have lost all desire to work, to dream, and in many instances to think beyond what they are told by the machine. As long as people's needs are met, they remain content. It isn't until the machine starts to fall apart that people realize what their lives should have been about.
If this plot sounds familiar, it's probably because it is the basis for the original story plan to the movie Wall-E. Once again, humankind has managed to destroy life on Earth and continues to fulfill their hedonistic lifestyle via the comfort of space. The humans in Wall-E have similarly transformed themselves into part of the machine in which they live. The remants of everything we associtate with the joys of human life aren't actually expressed by humans, but rather by a little machine named Wall-E and his AI friend Eve. Though the machines cannot actually feel the love they yearn for, their efforts to express such emotions essentially make them more human than human. As Wall-E and Eve dance through space, their trail embracing the beauty of a double helix, the machines have come to embrace the love that humans have abandoned.
Indeed, the supposed supremacy of humankind is vanishing. Man remains crippled by his own design while his creations yearn for the real emotions that their master has wasted. When our time has come and the remaining essence of our civilization finally crumbles, perhaps we too will yearn for such a love, as we stare up the genetic magnificence of all we should have been.
