Mankind: Devils or Angels?

(Man imitates nature - not the other way around)

Of devils and angels

I once asked an acquaintance what kind of people lived in his country. 

"Devils and angels," was the terse reply.

That made me think. OK, so what happens when the devils and angels get together for sex romps? What would their babies be like, I asked myself, trying to keep a straight face.

Suddenly the bulb flashed: Why, humans of course! A chip off the old blocks -- part devil, part angel. We're truly daddy and mommy's children!

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Or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

Man has never been known to keep on the straight and narrow for long. Man has always been up to some mischief or the other. One moment he's like the kind Dr Jekyll, and in another moment he's the vicious, brutal Mr Hyde.

Always flip-flopping, unpredictable, changeable, vain -- and treacherous. Even man doesn't trust man!  But then who can blame him for being so? After all he's made, or rather evolved, that way. It's in his very make-up, his DNA, and he just can't help it.

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A magnificent mongrel

Enter science into the fray. Man is really and literally an animal -- of the highest order, it says. Man is therefore a hybrid creature -- part human, part animal. Small wonder some wits aptly describe man as "manimals."  Some even think, with a good reason, that we are actually worse than animals!

No matter how hard man tries to be human, there's always the ever-present animal lurking underneath. And it has to be put on a tight leash.When law and order breaks down and chaos reign, man truly exhibits his animal nature: killing, looting, raping, etc. The tight leash imposed on his animal instincts by civilization is broken, at least for quite a while.

But the wildly amazing thing is that with all our litany of failings, we have achieved something even Mother Nature can never hope to accomplish: we have radically altered and embellished our world to make it a livable and exciting place -- something entirely different from the bare-boned and desolate one into which we were born.

What's more, in case we get bored with life and the exquisite pleasures of the flesh, we have also spiced things up with crime, wars and genocides. And that's not counting the mass slaughter of our fellow animals which we insist were created for us for food, labor, fun and sports.
 
If only our primitive ancestors could visit us, they'd be wide-eyed, lost, and knocking on the nearest police boxes to ask for directions ...


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Biological trash from nature's lab

Some scientists, such as James Lovelock, unkindly describe mankind as vicious viruses out to destroy the Earth and themselves ultimately. Others say life was seeded on Earth from elsewhere (panspermia) and therefore non-native to Earth.

All this made me wonder whether we couldn't be a discarded biological trash from the blind and mechanical Mother Nature's lab.  But whatever our provenance, we have survived and even thrived. We live because we have come to exist, and that's all it matters.

And in a brazen display of one-upmanship, we have returned nature's favor by showing her how to make our home livable, safer, interesting, and exciting. We have thoroughly and radically engineered and embellished our home beyond all recognition -- with just the raw materials we could scrounge in our neighborhood! And abracadabra, we have created an opulent and a well-furnished home.

It's an incredible triumph of man over nature.

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When mother doesn't know best

If only Mother Nature could understand. But she couldn't, could she? The simple fact is that she doesn't even know what she has done!

You see, Mother Nature is blind, deaf, dumb, and mechanical. She only follows the mechanical laws of nature which is her "religion". You can't really blame her for anything, for Mother Nature knows not what she's doing.

That is why we can imitate, wrest secrets and learn from the mighty but mindless and machine-like Mother Nature -- and not the other way around.

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First the bad news

If it's any comfort to us, there could possibly be other unwanted trash from Mother Nature's workplace which landed and created life elsewhere. And alarmingly, many experts think aliens couldn't be all that different from us.

And that's bad news!

The last thing you want is for aliens out there to act like us untrustworthy, whimsical, warring and two-faced humans. If aliens have got our silly and stupid messages and stopped ignoring our persistent efforts to contact them, we may be heading for a squabble and a right royal Star Wars over our clashing ambitions and civilizations one fine day.

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Now the good news

But there's also good news of sorts. As far as we are aware, aliens, if they exist at all, could be light years away from our physical, and so far technological, reach. (Forget the nutters who say aliens have not only reached us but are even living among us. Wonder what kind of grass they're smoking!).

And that's good news.

Vast distances between nations and civilizations make good friends and neighbors -- just like high walls and fences. And don't we have enough troubles with nature and fellow humans to contend with?

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The scary "gone" date

If all this make us feel proud, powerful and exuberant, there's an unshakeable something in our makeup that could give us a very sobering thought: our expiry dates. And there's no happy hunting ground out there somewhere to go to.

Death is the innate and inalienable property of life. The price of life is death. You can't have one without the other. Death stalks mankind from womb to tomb. Death is unavoidable -- unless you want to live inside a computer or a robot. (Dream on, devotees of immortality!)

This much is certain though: one day we may all be history -- extinct, obsolete, kaput. Mother Nature has put all her eggs in just one basket; we stick together and get fried  together. The Sword of Damocles is hanging over us. It's just a question of when it will become unstuck!.

If nukes don't finish us us all, asteroids and meteors will. When the big one comes along, we're just sitting ducks. And no one will miss us -- unmourned, unnoticed; just another unwritten chapter in the history of the universe.

In case those methods don't do their dirty job thoroughly, there are more ways to close the curtain on humanity, as some morbid researchers pointed out. (Just Google it.)

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Barbarian inside

Back to the other half of us which we call "the animal within." For all his monumental accomplishments, man is sadly also a destructive creature. Man creates, man destroys -- even his gods!

As mentioned earlier, some scientists think man is a virus which could eventually lead to the destruction of this whirling ball of earth we call our home. They say only man's extinction would prevent this from happening.

But then, without man what is the Earth but an uninhabited wasteland, an unfurnished, abandoned "home" in the boondocks of the universe. Even gods cannot live without man, hah!

And who needs a virus when there are so many other ways to screw up our home and kill us all?