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Robinson Crusoe
© David Boyne
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that every single one of us has been shipwrecked on this planet.
Remember just before you got here? You were sailing along, if not on Moonlight Bay, at least on a pacific ocean of amniotic fluid, under the sheltering night sky of your mother’s womb. Then wham! Up came a perfect storm. You were knocked about, tumbled around, and forcefully expelled, carried on a mighty wave from that dark ocean to dry land. Even while blinded by the nuclear bright sunlight of this new world, in a single heartbeat you had to sprint across a bridge that had taken your collective ancestors millennia to build—as you went from breathing underwater to breathing in air.
No wonder we all arrive screaming.
We are all Robinson Crusoes. And, while we never completely let go of our dream of returning whence we came, like Crusoe, we all dig in and cope with the urgent need to learn everything—absolutely everything—about this strange new world we find ourselves castaway in. The stakes are high. If we fail to learn and adapt, we die. Which maybe sends us back to whence we came, but that’s another story.
Amazingly, most of us survive, learn to walk, talk, ride bikes, borrow our parent’s cars, not mix tequila with red wine, and lie on our résumés and analysts’ couches. Miraculously, we teach our selves, from the molecular level up, how to see this bright world, how to hear its cacophony and filter its terabyte per nanosecond messages, how to smell it, how to taste it, how to touch it—ever so carefully—and how to create antibodies to keep it from killing us.
Yet, all the time we have been single-mindedly adapting, surviving, prospering or povertying, our environment has been a-changing. And guess what? The number one cause of change in our environment is (drum roll) us! (cymbal crash) It ain’t the planet’s or Nature’s or God’s unfolding plan anymore, it’s just us, messing everything up, and mucking everything up, and mixing everything up. Want a perfect example of how our collective frenetic pursuit of survival and happiness is giving the planet a fever? Take global warming. Please. (butta boom)
But then, if we humans weren’t here, things on planet Earth would kind of just keep rolling along and evolving, with Nature pretty much just rearranging the furniture, trying a mastodon here, a slightly tapered, slightly longer beak on these finches but not those finches, designing a new orchid every thousand years, and sighing, “Oh some blood-sucking arachnids up there might be just the thing. Maybe I’ll try that.”
But I wander.
I suspect that none of us castaways, ever, in our deepest heart and thoughts, ever fully accepts this place as the be all end all. Instead, we use it as our laboratory, as we await the next perfect storm that will knock us into another strange new world. We are always tinkering, on ourselves, and on everyone and every thing we come across. We can’t help it; it’s what we do. As a species, we have become masters of surviving in this once-alien environment we were cast away upon. Which makes things easier for the new souls finding themselves suddenly—here.
I think that may be the point of all my slinging about of words, words, words in this essay: I’m saying that this continual individual and collective altering of our environment that we incessantly do is making us smarter.
I would submit that intelligence is best measured by how much information we can process and respond to without getting ourselves killed. Therefore, the average guy who avoided getting fired for one more day by placating his ego-storming boss then crossed a busy city street to wait in line at Burger King is way smarter than the average hominid spear hunting on the savannah 10,000 years ago was.
And the increase of human intelligence is accelerating. Mostly powered by the engine of video games, but that ’s another story.
Anyhow, there’s no getting around it. Collectively, our kids are smarter than us. Their kids will be smarter than them. Their kids’ grandkids will grin indulgently as they read all of human history, while in kindergarten, and see what bumpkins we were. (OMG, they ate dairy! OMG, they burned stuff for energy!)
There’s a book some science writer and journalism professor Alan Weisman has authored called, “The World Without Us” (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 324 pages, $24.95). In Weisman’s book, he wonders, if something were to instantly erase mankind from the planet, how long would it then take the earth to erase all the stuff we left behind? Like Manhattan’s skyscrapers; Yankee stadiums (the new one and the old one); our zillion cars; trillion computers; few thousand books; and atomic clocks.
Which made me think how, compared to the world of some randomly chosen ancestor, say, a road-building civil engineer in the Roman Empire, the world we have created is far less ‘concrete’ than theirs. That Roman engineer’s roads and aqueducts have been lasting (or glacially decomposing, depending on your point of view) centuries since he returned to whence he came. So how about our information highways, our cyberspace* (A word coined fewer than two decades ago. Ahem. By a fiction writer.) where more and more of us do more and more of our living, how long would cyberspace last without us?
I suppose my point is that as we evolve as a species, we are less and less about things, and more and more about thoughts. A car is a car is a car. But what is information? It’s a coded message that needs to be decoded, but once decoded can be used to build a car. Or a nuclear bomb. Or a serum.
We are evolving from a material world to an ethereal world.
The newer word for cyberspace is The Cloud. I love this! The Cloud, in my mind, is nothing but human-generated thought encircling the planet. And while most folks may believe that communicating mind to mind, like the mental telepathy old sci-fi flicks were so fond of, is silly, I would ask, what is writing and reading, if not mental telepathy? The Time and Space continuum ain’t nothing to thought. Shakespeare had Hamlet “speaking” words, words, words, hundreds of years ago, and we’re still getting his thoughts, today.
But I wander.
Back to global warming. The thing about it is, we created it. And we’ll fix it. Because, like our patron saint, Robinson Crusoe, whatever we find in this world we’re shipwrecked in, we will take and change, make useful to us. And in doing that, we’ll create a new and even tougher complex of problems. These problems are our gifts to the next generation. Because we learned individually and collectively that the same mind that created a mess, cannot figure out how to clean it up. Only someone smarter can.
So we become smarter.
American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition - Cite This Source - Share This
cyberspace
The space in which computer transactions occur, particularly transactions between different computers. We say that images and text on the Internet exist in cyberspace, for example. The term is also often used in conjunction with virtual reality, designating the imaginary place where virtual objects exist. For example, if a computer produces a picture of a building that allows the architect to “walk” through and see what a design would look like, the building is said to exist in cyberspace.
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