11 February 2016

The Tool Makers


One of my favorite beats CD has a cover of an obese man with a T-Shirt that says "I'm No. 1 so why try harder". The name of the album is: You've Come a Long Way, Baby. The first song in that album is tied to a cool video that depicts, in a funny way, our evolution from amphibians to this obese man.

The transformation is unbelievable when the very-slow changes are scaled to such very-short duration. From what to what have we become! From where to where have we arrived!

And if the physical transformation is not enough, in the last few millennia sapiens seems to have turned even magical – almost godly. They seem to have conquered it all – earth, wind, fire and space. Long abandoned the ant-hole poking stick of their ancestors, now they are on the light (moon) that dot the dark curtain (sky) of the night!

If somebody from the dark ages could observe the present us (plausible if we ever learn to warp time too) they would run back to tell their folks that the future people have it easy and many of them labor throughout the day by punching or scraping a luminous surface (tablets/laptops/smartphones);

And that they have unlimited supply of meat from (broiler) chickens that do not run away;
And that luxury is available to all (Consumerism) … and not just the Queen;
And that they have machines (Photo-camera) that can hold us still in strange leaves and others that can even store the past (Video-Camera);


And that they can fly like the birds (airplanes);

And that they can conjure a spell that will enthrall you for hours (Movie);


And that they can stop the goddess from havoc (medicines for infectious diseases);
And that they can talk to anybody, even at the world’s end, by just speaking into the air (Mobile phones);


Even simpler insignificant stuff we use now is amazing to a time-traveler relative from a distant past say 200,000 B.C. Then they would say that we know to carve sound (pen) J Even a button would then be an immensely delightful finding.

A tool making animal is an animal who is self-conscious and wants to improve its current living situation. It’s probably this faculty, as a function of some accidental circuits in the brain that identifies humans from the rest of the earthlings.

Yeah, guess we can all pat our own backs in gratitude for ‘those who walked before us’.

2 comments:

  1. If no one went before us, there would not be a benchmark to measure ourselves against.

    Today Einstein's theory has been validated 100 years after he made the pronouncements.

    The elusive quest for the elixir that drives humans to achieve continues to test and rest in turns as man will realise the answers were all staring him in the face He was too busy looking at bits and pieces, he missed the whole picture.

    For each bit of life mechanism made to enhance living conditions, a costly prize is in the loop somewhere along the way. Time will tell.

    We should take a leaf out of our ancestors scripts to note that they conserved something to leave us a life on this planet.

    Are we doing anything along those lines with all the technology we have?

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  2. Thanks for revealing your blogspot avatar :) KGT.

    To answer your question : No, we are not. Reason is we are still like toddlers now. Science, exploration and technology are the toys; who even cares for such 'big pictures' now. Just play till we get tired of it and then we will step into the next bigger shoes.

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