Humanity Part 1: Fire

This is just a collaboration of thoughts I had one early morning.

P.S. My apologies when I go off in tangents, a common tendency of mine.

2:12am

Ink is not easily forgotten. Like all the writings before this. The writing and literature survives. And why is that? It’s only predator; the destructive force we use to destroy ourselves. Fire. Man learned the use of fire somewhere along his journey. It was at that paint man detached himself from the balance of nature. Fire was power. Thus we learned of power. Power is the basis of evolution, our intellectual evolution. For once the mind and the intellect became more powerful then speed, strength and numbers, there became no need for our evolution of those attributes. We then become outcasts. An outcast: that dominated everything. Power fuels everything that evolves man. War is power. War promotes weapons. Weapons drive technology. We attained absolute power, our evolution ended. We obtained the power to clear the world of life, the ultimate fire.

This is just a start please share your ideas :)

A few misconceptions, I think.

Ink is not easily forgotten. Like all the writings before this. The writing and literature survives.

Oh? All the writings? Sure about that?

And why is that? It’s only predator; the destructive force we use to destroy ourselves. Fire. Man learned the use of fire somewhere along his journey.

Ink to fire? What?

And just where did man learn the use of fire from? Prometheus?

It was at that paint man detached himself from the balance of nature. Fire was power. Thus we learned of power. Power is the basis of evolution, our intellectual evolution.

You attribute to much to fire. Neanderthals had fire (I think.) So did lots of other 'ape-men'. It's not fire that seperated us from our past. But language. Language, art, religion. Abstraction is the key to our evolution.

And again you use 'learn'. Maybe you mean discover? Learn insprires thoughts of a teacher. The gods sharing their knowledge with poor miserable man.

For once the mind and the intellect became more powerful then speed, strength and numbers, there became no need for our evolution of those attributes. We then become outcasts. An outcast: that dominated everything. Power fuels everything that evolves man. War is power. War promotes weapons. Weapons drive technology.

Fire is fire. Not power. It's our ability to see it as an abstract and use it in unorthodox ways that makes it powerful. Just as with any tools. It's not the tool it's our use of the tool that is power. You're making the tool our master.

War is war. It too is a tool. And you skipped a few million years of evolution in these few lines.

We attained absolute power, our evolution ended.

Oh? Really? Might as well just die then.

We neither have absolute power nor have we stopped evolving. The problem with the world today is that technology and culture is growing faster than our evolution can keep up. Look at the technological and cultural changes in the past 100 years. Evolution works over larger time scales than this.

And another problem might very well be that the evolutionary selective pressures is different. We have domesticated ourselves. We select for the peaceful and the meek for the most part. What will our species be like in a few million years of selecting along these lines? Mooooo.

We obtained the power to clear the world of life, the ultimate fire.

Wrong again. We barely have the power to destroy ourselves and the more specialized of the life forms. The earth would retreat into itself for a bit and churn out new life. Maybe even better life. We cannot destroy the earth. We can destroy ourselves, however.


You give us far too much credit. You'd think we were divine.