Extinction Momentum and the Critical Band
What a strange sort of species we are. As all others got bigger teeth, sharper claws, and quicker strides, we managed to tool our way out of the natural reject pile, in turn usurping the top spot of the predatory chain through a cognitive back door. How fitting, then, for our string-tied stones and sticks to themselves evolve to such beasts of devices, able to crater mountains at the push of a button. Like an animal enlarging its own teeth, sharpening its own claws, we have actively re-endowed our own ferocity, so much as to exceed the scope of possible targets. I dare say an animal that could claw the world in two so fairly might.
This is, indeed, where we stand. Majestic creatures that need to be mindful of the animal types that would otherwise tremble and disappear in their newly natural wake. The only classes we tend to intentionally eliminate include the pestilent, and the human, for whom we invented the bulk of our weaponry. Yes, one human may actively prime the harpoon and willfully slaughter every bit of a shark, but the human masses typically do not aim to destroy the shark masses in their entirety, as much as the same actions define both. The fishman wants to both do his job, and keep it, after all. That is the crux of the short-term versus long-term, individual versus collective matrix. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and eventually, nobody eats.
Collective behaviour is uncontrolled momentum. It can move so slowly, a potentially defective lumbering in fact concealing the ideas and actions that gain in strength, gaining until reaching such a size and speed as to become finally visible and heavily problematic. We are all people without whom the collective entity would not exist, yet we are each near-powerless to drive it off course, like sentient drops in a crashing wave. Six billion handshakes at once and the world could otherwise change overnight.
How tragic, then, for death to sign the long fast one-way road. We began the push early and never relented, having helped along the extinction of species since we were Cro-Magnon. Times changed, and so did the weaponry, the type and lethality marking the nation and age. For us to have survived to this point on the Earthen time line, in bold wars world and cold, have we needed to develop the primary technologies that naturally evolved into planet-destroying arms? While free human hands guided the process at every interval and turn, it is not always that individual freedom that commands the course of history. However much free will you believe an individual to wield, the acts of the group are governed by markedly less. We may never have had a choice.
But was this point really inevitable? A past-looking science fiction mind can posit a possible today with gaps in our developed technological tree. But there is a degree of sequentiality in scientific development. Synchronous inventions, like the calculus of both Newton and Leibniz, underscore this point. As society busies, the minds at the intellectual fringe tinker on to the next available, and rewrite the world’s rules. The zeitgeist informs the hearts of the people and steers our compulsive drive towards progress, drives it off a cliff with an eventually floored, braking foot.
Evolution has a remarkably cunning side that humbles those that over-thrive. Perhaps this is a backup plan that levels uneven playing fields, just as a booming population inevitably stumbles into an equivocating famine. A predator is bones without prey. On a long enough time line, the capacity to destroy must always at least equal the capacity to create, mustn’t it? The balance of change requires the checked strength of the destructive.
If this fails to comfort you, consider that this storm cloud’s lining yields another, peculiar, bitter-sweet bookend: we have entered upon an age of realistic planetary annihilation at the pre-cusp of inter-planetary travel. How delightfully narrative for us to achieve the capacity to destroy our planet along with the capacity to leave it and potentially begin anew. We’re most certainly in the thick of it now. As much as the bookend may seem decidedly more bitter than sweet, it is the only way for us to stick around should our biosphere collapse, or should a once-unitary mass be reduced to continental dust by means of nuclear cluster or the like.
Could space travel have come first, or not at all, or is this critical band of total vulnerability a sequentially encoded phenomenon? Were technology to exist in another world, even with an entirely distinct foundation, could this general pressure point have necessarily come to pass after enough leaps in technological orders of magnitude? No human invented destruction, however much we may have glorified it. Indeed, perhaps the biggest obstacle for otherworldly life to overcome in finding us is the survival through this critical band. The absence of visitation is thus discouraging. Let us hope that our future is not written in the stars.
