We Are Fueling Another Species War
And this time, we may not be the victors
7 MINS READ
Hello,
I am attempting a history cum philosophy issue today. Let's see how it goes.
Homo sapiens has not really been friendly.
Thousands of years ago, we were not the only humans on earth.
Now that we’re alone, studies point accusing fingers at us.
For today’s issue, we’ll take some lessons from prehistory, the time long before anyone wrote a history book.
Are we preparing the stage for another war?
You have probably seen this picture.
It is sketched in numerous textbooks and even displayed on charts in classrooms around the world.
On the far left is an ape-like creature. Then, a series of increasingly upright creatures with lesser hair.
At the far right, as the final figure, stands modern man.
Homo sapiens.
The undisputed ruler of earth. The “crown of evolution”.
But what could be wrong with this picture?
A billion things, I know.
One is that we can’t reliably depict these extinct species. So, gait, skin color and amount of hair may be misleading.
But that is not exactly my point.
Not ancestors, but siblings …
The picture seems to depict the evolution of man from a ground-crawling chimp-like creature to the spacecraft-building modern man.
The idea is that, in between these figures is millions of years and that each one transformed into the other over the course of that time.
Well, that story is not true. At least, for this picture.
Thing is, homo erectus, homo denisova, homo neaderthalensis, homo florensiensis and homo luzonensis were not the ancestors of homo sapiens. Most of them lived at the same time.
They were all humans.
Think about this: there are several species of dogs, cats, pigs, etc.
Why is there only one specie of human beings?
And no. Races are not species.
We are all homo sapiens irrespective of our skin color.
So, why are we alone?
Thing is, millions of years ago, the human family split from the chimpanzees.
Our species lived only in East Africa. Then about 70,000 years ago, we ventured out
When we got to Europe and the Middle East, we met the Neanderthals, another more muscular human species with bigger brains.
They built tools, hunted and cared for the sick among them.
Very human.
Homo erectus, the longest surviving human species, was living in East Asia
What happened afterwards is a hogwash of theories.
One, Sapiens and Neanderthals loved up. Meaning that, today's Eurasians are a result of that interbreeding.
The same also happened with homo erectus.
As a consequence, the Interbreeding Theory says that most humans are not pure sapiens. But rather, a mixture of these human species.
The second theory is a story of violence and revulsion.
It follows that Sapiens and other species were so different that sexual relationships would have been extremely difficult. And also, that even if they did, their children was infertile.
This could have been because they had evolved separately and the genetic gulf between them was too wide.
Because of this, when the Neanderthals went extinct, their genes went with them.
What is the truth?
Well, we've discovered that it's probably both.
In rare cases, Sapiens were able to produce offspring with Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Well, so what happened to them?
Simple. We drove them to extinction.
Sapiens had superior tools and social skills that helped us excel as hunters and gatherers.
The Neanderthals were unluckily less resourceful than us. While Sapiens spread, they struggled to compete with us for food and slowly died out.
There's also the possibility of violent conflict between us and Neanderthals.
Whenever we arrived to a new place, the native human population was wiped out.
About 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals left the scene alongside the other species.
They had big brains like ours so, what was our edge?
Sapiens had a few extra gifts.
Our social skills allow us to cooperate far better than any other animal.
Although many animals can communicate, humans seem to be impressively better at building large communities.
We can alter our behaviour in ways that go against our biological programming and we can create cultures.
Neanderthals didn't show much of these signs.
We outhunted them by being able to cooperate and hunt huge animals in large groups while Neanderthal bands were too small.
We probably also brought novel diseases that they had poor immunity to.
We knowingly or unknowingly ravaged them.
This story is familiar. A group with superior technology meets one with inferior technology and they bow or die, or both.
In recent history, aboriginal Australians and Native Americans were almost decimated by the diseases and weapons of European settlers.
Global ecology has also suffered as we have driven many animals to extinction or to the brink of extinction.
Maybe, we are feeling sorry. That's why we are racing at breakneck speed to build another human species.
But this new species seems to be coming with the skills that helped us decimate our brother humans.
The advantages of a computer 'brains' blazes past ours. Unlike our slow neurons, electronic circuits are at least a million times faster.
They send signals at the speed of electricity or at the speed of light. AI software can be even be copied and duplicated.
If we boast of our ability to learn from each other and pass information generations, advanced AI will be able to share knowledge incomprehensibly faster and in perfect detail.
And while our abilities are locked in the size of our brains, the more chips AI has access to, the more it scales higher.
Frank Herbert’s Dune is perhaps the greatest science fiction series ever.
I got to know it through the 2021 movie adaptation directed by Dennis Villeneuve. It starred the young and subtly talented Timothee Chalamet as a young duke of the eponymous desert planet, and Zendaya as his blue-eyed love interest.
After seeing the movie, I went online to read about Dune. I got the first novel. I got the unofficial Dune Encyclopedia.
I was hooked.
The world of Dune is testament to Herbert's fabulously fertile imagination. The geography, religion, politics and, science and technology in this work is so impressively developed that it is adamantly difficult to accept it as a fiction.
And what is also amazing is how the story starts.
The events of Dune are set 10,000 years after a war. And that war is imagined to occur some thousand years from our own present.
In that war, the human race rose against computers. And we obliterated them.
It was called the Butlerian Jihad.
The story doesn’t say why or what caused the war. Only that it did happen.
In a religion that developed post-war, a command that prohibited the making of machines was inscribed in the supreme religious text, the Orange Catholic Bible.
In the absence of computers, humans, which lived in an interplanetary empire, fared well, devising systems to sharpen their mental powers.
In The Creator (2023), after a nuclear bomb strikes Los Angeles, the West declares war on sentient robots.
The tables are reversed in the hugely popular Matrix and Terminator series. In the former, robots milk humans and construct false realities to keep us docile. And in the latter, they use backward time travel to attempt to quell a human resistance before it happens.
If we are introducing a new human species into the planet, we have to create for them, a safe place to live.
We have to engineer a whole framework of legal and societal rules that will apply to them as well as to us.
If they’ll have any rights, we have to determine them beforehand and also prepare flexibly should they require more rights.
We have to answer uncomfortable questions like, what spaces will be their own, how much freedom and independence will they have, what goals could they aspire to.
In essence, are we creating unindentured slaves or co-workers on this green planet?
If they have anything like feelings, and we treat them poorly, they’ll revolt.
And we’ll definitely strike back.
Sparks will start flying and the world will go up in flames.
I know we’re used to being victors but, let’s not push our luck too far.
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Until tomorrow,
With love and ink,
Emmanuel
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