A Definition of Biohazardous Materials:
Biohazardous materials are those materials of biological origin that could potentially cause harm to humans, domestic or wild animals, or plants. Examples include recombinant DNA; transgenic animals or plants, human, animal or plant pathogens; biological toxins (such as tetanus toxin); human blood and certain human body fluids; and human or monkey cell cultures.
Why not also include that tool wielding beast with the large brain and opposable thumbs: Homo sapiens? Consider the following:
The humans have created enough nuclear explosives that, if distributed in an egalitarian fashion, each and every one of them would have the equivalent of 3000 kg of TNT - enough to bring about a nuclear winter and leave the Earth with a pleasant incandescent glow for some undetermined length of time.
Why, shortly, these scrawny hairless bipeds will be completely capable of raining down upon their homeworld another kind of death from above: asteroids purposefully deflected ever so slightly from their distant orbits so as to impact the Earth. This might sound outlandish now... but someday a system to shield the Earth from naturally occuring wanderers will be put in place, and any system capable of preventing that catastrophe is also capable of creating it, in the hands of the wrong overly agressive monkey.
Consider also that there are those among the humans who would unhesitatingly engage in the creation of biological weapons - orgainsms which by design are as biohazardous as possible, and which by the nature of life itself, once created require virtually no infrastructure to manufacture.
Not all of humanity's threats come from agression: perhaps just as dangerous is negligence. H. sapiens is a crisis driven species, persisting in dangerous and destructive behavior until the consequences have become so grave and undeniable as to demand attention. Deforestation and intensive agriculture practices, due in large part to unchecked growth of the human population, have led to mass wasting and loss of productive topsoils in many of the most heavily populated areas, and the destruction of habitat for many other Earth species.
The protective layer of ozone which came into being 2.2 billion years ago, with the advent of oxygenic photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, has slowly been eroded over the last century by emissions from the ever expanding human industry. Their machines. Their factories. Their surrogate thumbs. Other changes in the atmosphere coming at their behest seem to be warming the planet as well. Things are changing, and fast. The fastest biogenic change this world has ever seen.
Homo sapiens is a walking extinction event. They may extinguish themselves, and in the process take much of the painstakingly accumulated complexity of Earth with them. Ironic that such a species should have christened itself with words which mean "wise man".
And if we did extinguish ourselves, how would it look to a long t o a long term observer - someone staring at us unrelentingly over the aeons from the face of the moon perhaps. An eye watching the frozen earth thaw six hundred million years ago, followed by the explosion of Cambrian diversity. They would patiently watch as this newfound complexity multiplied and spread across the globe in new and ever changing patterns, becoming all the ancient creatures of the sea, and creeping out onto the land to begin the age of mighty reptiles, the swarms of insects arriving with the first flowering plants. And every now and then, a cataclysm would change the stage, as did the meteor impact 65 million years ago that ended the Cretaceous, and allowed us our time in the limelight.
Then what would they see, these time-lapsed moon eyes? They would see us climb down from the trees of eastern Africa. They'd see us pick up a rock one day, and heft it in our primitive hands. And they would see those hands change form over the millennia, to heft the rock with more precision, they would see the hand become a tool, the tool. They would witness our entry into the trans-human experience. We are extensible beings; we extend our senses and our bodies with our tools. We are an animal in symbiosis with technology, and our hands were our first tools, the rest are simply extensions of those opposable thumbs - meta tools. Someday we will be unable to live without it. When we disperse throughout the Universe, through the cold, dark, radiation soaked depths of space, it will only be possible because we have extended our senses and bodies. Oxygen, water, food, shelter, and to obtain them, the ever-present glow and hum of our technology.
In contrast, look at the dolphins. They seem to be very intelligent, and capable of complex communication and social behavior. Despite the fact that we do not understand what they say, what they think, I believe that their intellects are at least on par with our own, but they lack the thumb. Their bodies are exquisitely adapted to the environment in which they live, but they cannot willfully adapt to new environments, they have no tools. In some ways, I envy their existence; it seems simpler than ours. But at the same time, it is less free. We are free to the point of potential fault. We are free to destroy ourselves and all that we survey. Is that what we will choose to do?
You can think of life like a differential equation. There are expressions of a certain form which satisfy the equation - these solutions are living organisms. It's much more complex than any differential equation I've ever seen though, as each solution is dependent on which other solutions are currently extant. Dinosaurs were a wonderful solution for millions of years, but they could not have survived in an icy pre-Cambrian world filled only with unicellular life, nor could we. There are some solutions which are doomed. The first oxygenic bacteria apparently poisoned their atmosphere with the byproduct of their own existence: Oxygen, without which virtually none of the life on Earth today would exist. Are we to be one of these solutions? Is an intelligent, tool wielding beast with an evolutionary predisposition to agressive behavior simply non-viable in the long run?
Or will we choose a different path? Today we are on the verge of being able to tinker with the equation of life through genetic engineering. This is the tool to end all tools. Thousands of years ago we moved from gene based evolution to meme based evolution, and now that long litany of ideas has led us back to the genes which gave us the ability to pursue ideas in the first place. Might we, realizing the danger of the evolutionary baggage we carry, decide to drop it?
I don't consider myself pessimistic, I just think we need to realize that we are dangerous, powerful beings, and the choices we make as a society, as a species, have long ranging consequences. The very things that make us so dangerous also give us the potential for transcendence, the power to deeply know the Universe of which we are such a special part.
It is with the desire for this realization in mind that I have created the Human Biohazard Van. Hopefully it will serve as a reminder to a few, and perhaps those few will tell others. If you have seen the van, send me an e-mail and let me know what you thought.
SOURCE
No comments:
Post a Comment