Evolution is a wonderful thing. We humans wouldn’t be here without it. Life on Earth started around two billion years ago and through thick and thin, through disasters that several times almost resulted in total extinction of living beings, life maintained itself and changed and evolved over all those years and resulted in its finest work: Humankind.
But let’s take a closer look at all those humans and the work they’ve done. What are they doing to the planet that nourished and fed and housed and bathed them? Is humankind about to destroy the only home it has ever known? Why in Heaven’s name would evolution result in a species with so much brain power that it is capable of producing a society that could, potentially at least, destroy the very planet that gave rise to it? Is this evolution gone awry?
Only humankind has that ability. Only the absolute top tier, maximum level, ultimate peak of the evolutionary scale could fashion an environment that destroys itself from the inside out. All other species, even the highest apes, seem to be satisfied with the environment in which they exist. The most intelligent creatures in the oceans, dolphins, as well as the chimpanzees, live comfortably with in their individual milieu, without making any substantial changes to it. Do chimpanzees build buildings that reach high above the jungle canopy? Do dolphins build rockets that explore the moon or Mars? Or anything else? So why Humans? Why Homo sapiens?
Why would evolution result in a species that has the brain power to destroy itself? Has evolution gone berserk? I find myself wondering if there were ever alternatives to the development of a species with such a highly developed brain. We have far more brain capacity than needed to simply survive. So why did evolution go in that direction?
One of the factors (and there are many, all postulated, none proven) that have been cited as to why we humans have not heard from aliens from outer space is the possibility that every great society that evolves on a planet anywhere in the galaxy (and even in the universe) always comes to a point where it cannot go any farther, and ultimately destroys itself. Those who think about such things have termed it a “great extinction.” For whatever reason, destruction proceeds from within, and no society ever gets to the point where it is capable of developing super-sophisticated spaceships that can travel the galaxy to visit other planets, and, ultimately, us here on Earth. Personally, I don’t subscribe to that theory, at least not in its ultimate aspect where every civilization reaches that end. That theory assumes that evolution proceeds the same way on all planets where life evolves, which, I think, is extremely unlikely.
But is that scenario unlikely on Earth? Are we about to destroy ourselves? Is evolution so flawed that its ultimate development is to simply die out? Why would evolution allow such a species to develop in the first place? The brain of the human is so highly complicated that it can develop and understand differential equations. (Well beyond my ability.) It knows about nuclear energy and fusion and fission, and orbital dynamics, and vaccines against disease, and all that stuff, all things that are interesting and nice to have, but not absolutely necessary for existence of life here. We’ve gone way far beyond what is necessary simply to exist.
One of the hallmarks of evolution has been the fact that each level of development is unable to foresee the physical and mental characteristics of the next level. Dinosaurs couldn’t possibly have foreseen that mammals would take over as the dominant species and dig their bones out of the ground, or protozoa predict multicellular animals, or insects predict animals without a hard, chitinous outer layer and a fully-enclosed circulatory system, or fishes predict amphibians. Now, with our super highly developed brain power, can we predict the next step beyond “human”? Or has evolution shot itself in the foot, or even through the temple, and we are the pinnacle of the evolutionary scale, bound and doomed too be the last?