The total collapse of the worthless agreements made at this conference was as predictable as the collapse of the life support on this planet, something which is destined to happen if we insist on carrying on the way we have up until now. .
These and related developments have led me to the following reflections: .
My basic hypothesis is that homo sapiens was brought onto this planet with the express purpose of destroying it. At the cosmic level, whenever a planet is in its penultimate stage before death, the World Spirit, the Dialectic Process, Godhead, whatever name one gives to the force driving Evolution, creates a self-conscious, thinking, sentient life form to do the killing. The reason is simple: Man is the only animal on this planet that fully understands that life is hopeless..
The following situation is typical: the interaction between a bear and, say, a squirrel. The hungry bear sees a squirrel and starts chasing it through the forest. The agile squirrel jumps up a tree, climbing very quickly to a high vantage which the bear cannot reach. After a few lunges the bear realizes that it hasn't got time to waste and wanders off.
A few minutes later, one finds that the squirrel has traveled back to the forest floor. The bear is, perhaps, only 30 feet away, chewing on the leaves of another tree. The squirrel starts playing with some companions. It has totally forgotten the threat posed by the bear. Until the bear decides to resume the chase the squirrel will take no account of the potential danger it poses. The squirrel is programmed to respond only to immediate fears of injury, pain, hunger, death.
Generally speaking, and there are some culturally learned skills that don't affect the argument, he defenses that animals build against future or potential dangers are determined largely by instincts. For example, beavers build dams, not because they wake up one morning with the clever idea of building a dam, but because Nature has instilled a dam-building instinct in them over many millions of years.
How different this is from us humans! Let's say that a bear chases one of us up the tree. Even while he or she is clinging to the topmost branches of the try, they are dreaming up plans to organize a mission to destroy all the bears in the forest. Let it be a woman because we are bored with men taking the limelight in most illustrative examples. Even while she is clinging to the topmost branches she is planning how to organize a hunt to kill all the bears in the forest. She feels that she will never be safe as long as one bear is left alive.
At the deepest level all of us realize, with a certainly, that there is no permanent protection against potential threats, that nothing reduces our vulnerability, that, if nothing else, death's grim certainty awaits us. Yet we still, senselessly, (though how can it be senseless if we have no choice?) try to nullify every threat, no matter how far-fetched.
We are indeed being driven to do the impossible : Don Quixote, as individual, is an amateur compared to mankind as a collective species. Despite our knowing that we are ultimately defenseless, we continue to try everything we can think of to turn Earth into a permanent home, as if we were even welcome here, let alone ill here forever. .
To this end we zealously plunder its resources, seeking to protect outselves against all present, future, or hypothetical contingencies. We wage wars to extend as much control as possible over territories and populations; degrading land, sea, and atmosphere with toxic poisons, the waste products of insatiable hungers that only increase with their gratification, knowing deep down inside that such gratifications cannot protect us, stave off death, or give us satisfactory reasons for continuing to be here.
Briefly: Nature has so contrived us that we are driven by dire necessity to devastate Nature. My thesis, indeed is that this is part of Nature's intention!
I am assuming that everyone believes, as I do, that in some fundamental he or she belongs to the over-arching scheme of things. What I'm saying here is that this is indeed true, though not in the way that this symbiosis of Man with Nature is normally conceived. We belong here primarily because every cemetery needs its undertakers. After 4-plus billion years it is time for the planet to go, to join the lifeless ranks of Mercury, Venus. all the way up to Pluto and the ice planets beyond the Solar System.
We are here to bury the Earth, not to praise it. And the cruel, yet infinitely ingenious trick designed by the forces that rule the universe to bring this about, is in the simple shift from "instinct" to "thought" as the primarily modality of mental functioning. We, as a species, are literally worrying ourselves to extinction, taking the whole evolutionary Tree of Life along with us.
Maybe it's high time: 4 billion years may be enough for the prolonged life of any planet. And new planets are blooming everywhere in the cosmos. However, if we wish to be reborn as sentient creatures, only the old ones, those entering their final phase, will be open to receive us.