Fitting designation for an arid place difficult to traverse on foot: Jornada del Muerto, variously translated as an idiom, “Journey of the Dead Man,” “Working Day of the Dead Man,” “Day of the Dead Man,” or even “Day of Death.” Could it vie for the scariest name of a desert with Takla Makan (“You go in but don’t come out”) or with Kalahari (“waterless land”)? It is in the vicinity of such a place that the United States tested the first nuclear bomb in 1945. Great destruction in a place with little to destroy. It is also fitting that J. Robert Oppenheimer, after witnessing the product of his work, could think of nothing other than a saying from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” It is also in this waterless place that one can find trinitite, the greenish glass we might say is the product of fusion by fission.
Certainly, our species has outdone anything that Homo habilis, one of the first, if not the first, primitive hominin tool-users, could have imagined. Were he alive to stumble across trinitite, H. habilis would stop, gather, and adorn with the apparent glassy gem, all the while being unaware of its radioactive nature. A product of our making, trinitite formed when the fission bomb melted and fused desert soil with the steel tower at the test site. We, better informed, would collect with trepidation: Wearing trinitite jewelry invites leukemia.
Not only can we make something not found in Nature, but we can also understand how we relate to its unseen properties. That’s how sophisticated we have become. We both understand and control matter and energy, the fundamental components of the universe. We know more about matter and energy than any previous hominin group and more than billions of our even more recent human predecessors of post-Medieval time knew. We fashion tools they could not foresee.
Is it strange that one of our most sophisticated tools is a Destroyer of Worlds?
Not really. In the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a bone tool evolves quickly into a weapon. That development seems probable given our current technological state and penchant to use tools to destroy. Even in the vast desolation of the Kalahari Desert, one of the oldest continuously arid places on the planet occupied by “aboriginal” peoples, the indigenous !Kung have developed weapons (as have the remotest of South American tropical rainforest peoples who until recently had no contact with technological societies). Bow, arrow, blow gun, and dart extend our ability to destroy over wider places. Of course, as we all know, a hand–axe can be used both to process food and to break a skull: A tool’s purpose depends on the individual. And all people seem to recognize that some destroy to live whereas others live to destroy. The !Kung, a technologically primitive people whose lives before the arrival of the Dutch and other Europeans were literally “Stone Age,” “call themselves zhu twa si, ‘the harmless people,’ in contrast to non-San, whom they call zosi, ‘animals without hooves,’ meaning they are as dangerous as predator animals.”* Imagine. Even in the most technologically primitive of circumstances of a waterless land with little to destroy, one people recognizes another as zosi because they pose a threat.
Homo habilis could not have anticipated a world in which the most sophisticated tool is an instrument of complete destruction. Yet, it was that first tool user who set us on a technological path to the bomb, not just by the invention of tools, but also by some seemingly hereditary capacity to destroy beyond necessity. Along time’s road to the present, hominins have killed billions of their own kind.
We can look back and forward to ask ourselves about our nature. Proudly adorned in trinitite and other products of our technology, are we, like so many before us but with more sophisticated tools, traveling across a waterless land on the journey of a dead man toward a day of death. Are we innately Destroyers of Worlds?
* http://orvillejenkins.com/profiles/kung.html
And, by way of a related thought, "In the order of life there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the realisation of the full possibilities of the present" (Hamilton Wright Mabie, Books and Culture). What will be the realization of our present?
Certainly, our species has outdone anything that Homo habilis, one of the first, if not the first, primitive hominin tool-users, could have imagined. Were he alive to stumble across trinitite, H. habilis would stop, gather, and adorn with the apparent glassy gem, all the while being unaware of its radioactive nature. A product of our making, trinitite formed when the fission bomb melted and fused desert soil with the steel tower at the test site. We, better informed, would collect with trepidation: Wearing trinitite jewelry invites leukemia.
Not only can we make something not found in Nature, but we can also understand how we relate to its unseen properties. That’s how sophisticated we have become. We both understand and control matter and energy, the fundamental components of the universe. We know more about matter and energy than any previous hominin group and more than billions of our even more recent human predecessors of post-Medieval time knew. We fashion tools they could not foresee.
Is it strange that one of our most sophisticated tools is a Destroyer of Worlds?
Not really. In the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a bone tool evolves quickly into a weapon. That development seems probable given our current technological state and penchant to use tools to destroy. Even in the vast desolation of the Kalahari Desert, one of the oldest continuously arid places on the planet occupied by “aboriginal” peoples, the indigenous !Kung have developed weapons (as have the remotest of South American tropical rainforest peoples who until recently had no contact with technological societies). Bow, arrow, blow gun, and dart extend our ability to destroy over wider places. Of course, as we all know, a hand–axe can be used both to process food and to break a skull: A tool’s purpose depends on the individual. And all people seem to recognize that some destroy to live whereas others live to destroy. The !Kung, a technologically primitive people whose lives before the arrival of the Dutch and other Europeans were literally “Stone Age,” “call themselves zhu twa si, ‘the harmless people,’ in contrast to non-San, whom they call zosi, ‘animals without hooves,’ meaning they are as dangerous as predator animals.”* Imagine. Even in the most technologically primitive of circumstances of a waterless land with little to destroy, one people recognizes another as zosi because they pose a threat.
Homo habilis could not have anticipated a world in which the most sophisticated tool is an instrument of complete destruction. Yet, it was that first tool user who set us on a technological path to the bomb, not just by the invention of tools, but also by some seemingly hereditary capacity to destroy beyond necessity. Along time’s road to the present, hominins have killed billions of their own kind.
We can look back and forward to ask ourselves about our nature. Proudly adorned in trinitite and other products of our technology, are we, like so many before us but with more sophisticated tools, traveling across a waterless land on the journey of a dead man toward a day of death. Are we innately Destroyers of Worlds?
* http://orvillejenkins.com/profiles/kung.html
And, by way of a related thought, "In the order of life there can be no real break between things as they now exist and things as they will exist in the remotest future; the future cannot contradict the present, nor falsify it; for the future must be the realisation of the full possibilities of the present" (Hamilton Wright Mabie, Books and Culture). What will be the realization of our present?
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