If I had a choice of planets to live on, Terra Firma would firmly be at the bottom of my list. Safety, amongst other reasons would be at the top of my list for extra-terrestial migration. Is there no such thing as global intelligence ? How can you otherwise possibly explain that 16o million people have been killed in warfare in the same century that saw the discovery of the DNA, the flight to the moon and back and realized that the search for Reality extends from the inside of the atom to the outermost stretches of the known universe ?
The answer my friend, is flowing in our genes. We are natural born killers, homicidal lunatics kept in leash only by fears of our own destruction or being locked up. But as Charles Darwin showed us how to defend our worst behaviours, we are descended from those killer apes who survived by killing other competing apes off. It paid in the wild to kill other species, but the fact that we are still doing so within our own species indicates that beyond Darwin, there must be another reason.
I believe that we are genetically programmed to believe that if large groups of us worked together at it, killing is okay. It becomes legitimate – the Catholic Church, Hitler, Saddam Hussain and even the U.S. Army in Vietnam believed that they were killing on justified, legitimate grounds !
But in the fact that individually (barring a few psychopaths) killing still terrifies most of us, lies hope. We have reached a stage where we can evolve beyond our genes, as we have the power to change the environment where such ‘group killer’ genes can get the chance to express themselves. If the jungle is gone, does it make sense to let the beast survive ?
There will never be any such thing as World Peace, as there will never be any United States of Mankind. But there can surely be things like global intelligence, a global sense of what’s right and what’s wrong and an agreement about what’s best for us. So that scared Earthlings like myself do not have to wish for other planets they could migrate to.
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