Fallen Beings

WorldAtlas says: "Humans and their ancestors have been walking the planet for about 6 million years. Homo sapiens, who are the modern form of humans, evolved 300,000 years ago from Homo erectus."

UniverseToday says: "While our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization started in earnest only in the 1800s."

But then, humans became a little too clever. The world's first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945, at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the barren plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, known as the Jornada del Muerto. Upon witnessing the explosion, J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called The Father of the Atomic Bomb, recalled a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in which Vishnu says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Today is April 9, 2022, meaning the first atomic bomb was exploded 76 years ago. Only 76 years ago. And already, the dictator of a nuclear state is rattling the nuclear sword, threatening Armageddon if he cannot have his way and conquer his peaceful neighbors in brutal fashion while committing horrific war crimes in the process.

Can anyone think that we humans will not, one day, destroy our present civilization? It may take millennia, but we will rise again, and our far-removed descendants will find, here and there, the remains of our civilization and wonder who built it. They will eventually discover the artifacts we left behind on the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan, and they will wonder how we primitive humans were able to extend our reach to other planets. It will be as big a mystery to them as this mystery is to us: the mystery of how ancient Egyptians and Incas carved and transported huge stone blocks using tools wholly unsuited to such tasks.

Perhaps those humans living many thousands of years in the future will avoid another holocaust. Perhaps they will evolve into a more peaceful species and find a way to avoid obliterating their civilization. But as for us? I would give the odds of survival for our current civilization as being fifty-fifty at best, and I think I'm being an optimist. I would love to be wrong, but I've seen too much of "Man's inhumanity to man," a phrase, incidentally, that was first written by Robert Burns in 1784 in a poem titled Man was made to mourn: A Dirge. Burns may have reworded a similar quote from Samuel von Pufendorf, who in 1673 wrote, "More inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature's causes." 

How can one be an optimist in the presence of so much evidence of human evil? But at least, knowledge is power, and knowing we are a fallen species is a reason to try to be better humans: a more loving, more understanding, more wise, more valuing kind of human. We may have an uphill battle, but our future is in our hands. I'm sure many people will deny that a serious problem exists, but we cannot correct a problem until we admit we have a problem.