Consequences

This morning I thought about a book I read long ago called "Blood Music". It's a story about a man who develops a way to make the individual cells in the body sentient.

Now, this might sound like a good idea at the face of it. I mean, if you could tell blood cells to go after cancer, or where to fight an infection, that might be cool, right? But the guy decides to inject himself with this stuff, and of course these newly sentient blood cells have their own agenda.

(Here's where I put the spoiler alert -- if you should have a desire to read the book, which was pretty good, you might want to skip the rest of this post.)

Basically what happens is that the cells in the man's body, after getting him to go through an all-night marathon with his girlfriend, disintegrate her down the shower drain and merrily go off into the world, turning it into an individual-cell paradise, with our civilizations and biosphere sacrificed in the end.

Today I thought how well this applies to our Taker culture.

We have used our Fertile Crescent (which is now a desert wasteland), then spread out into the world, merrily turning the whole world into our little paradise, slaughtering thousands of other civilizations and cultures, as well as pretty much destroying our own ecosystem.

Just as the man in the story never thought about the consequences to creating cell sentience, neither did our ancestors think of the end result to developing totalitarian agriculture. And here we are, as the last man on Earth did, staring at the results of this folly, wondering if anything will survive as we know it.