Humanity: that species of living beings, inhabitants of planet Earth, which over the last ten thousand years has reshaped its surroundings in order to multiply and live longer.
Using tools to shape its surroundings, and collective ideas to do the same with its reality.
Over several thousand years and a couple of surges we like to call revolutions, we reached the last hundred years, which truly broke the natural limits of our species.
Several of the contrivances created by our collective mind fell into line, and they allowed many individuals to work together, even towards different goals. A new economic system (as we decided to call it) found in science and technological progress new ways to create value for individuals. This was so evident that the part of society devoted to leading and making decisions (governments, as we usually call them) chose to foster that relationship.
Then came those decades in which the natural limits themselves began to change. We started by lengthening our lives and ended up finding ways to modify our genetic makeup. We changed how we build and sell goods and services, so much so that it even halted wars in exchange for being able to trade. It made us understand aspects of the universe’s elementary particles, and now we use them to connect the whole world, sending information literally at the speed of light. We left the planet, set foot on our natural satellite and photographed our planet from the edge of the solar system.
Great and impressive collective achievements, but individual motives never changed. The gaps in knowledge, purchasing power and influence are wider than ever. The reckless use of the resources the planet gives us, and the fact that it has no immediate effect, lead us, stupidly, to treat it as irrelevant.
Our selfishness, perhaps inherent to our human nature, combined with our great cognitive capacity, managed to build a system in which we collaborate by winning what we want. And therein lies its fragility, because as long as no one wins, the system doesn’t work. And today a molecule, one that arises precisely as a slight flaw in our evolutionary machinery, won’t let us win.
Humanity is the very embodiment of irony.