This morning I experienced a sort of “AHA!” insight that I want to share with you now — even if the ink on my haphazardly scribbled notes has not yet even had any opportunity to dry in the fresh, crisp early autumn air.
To provide more context, let me first add that quite a few things are within my environment and impacting my thoughts. First and foremost is a podcast I recently listened to and was greatly inspired by: an interview with Brenna Hassett on Alan Alda’s “Clear + Vivid” series of episodes — and here also quite specifically the focus the two placed on “infant mortality” (and how humans are particularly oriented towards perfection in low mortality rates for their own offspring). Other phenomena in my environment include the widespread and catastrophic severe flooding in eastern and southeastern Europe being reported on in mainstream media news channels, and / or also the other radio programming playing in the background of my daily tasks in the kitchen and whatever.
And let’s not forget to mention my posts about “Living Here” and “More or Less is Better” from a few weeks back.
Now to the nitty-gritty details. Let’s assume that humans are indeed the most perfectionist species with respect to high survival rates (or low mortality rates). Let’s also grant humans that “leadership” position as if it were some kind of natural right. That said, it would be foolish to aspire to 100% perfectionism (my father used to remind incessantly that there is no such thing as 100% or 0%). So even though I just heard in the news reports that there is a (first) casualty as a result of the flooding, perhaps we should expect casualty to happen every now and then — we simply cannot expect to all survive forever.
The next question is: what degree (or rate) of casualty should we consider acceptable? The widespread norm is to respond by shouting loudly and clearly that no death is acceptable under any circumstances — and that is such a strong norm that it almost seems absurd to call it ridiculous. But I agree with my father in this regard: it is pretty much completely ridiculous (do you sense the irony of the term “completely“? 😉 ).
Well, let me propose a ballpark or a starting point where we can begin to (hopefully somewhat rationally) engage in this discussion.
First, let’s delineate “nature” versus “technology”. Nature is the world we were born into — fully naked and without living rooms, kitchens, cars in garages, or pedals we could put to the metal to go from here to there and everywhere and whatnot more in our daily lives. Technology also includes telephones and TV sets, hospitals and government buildings, war machines and power companies and much much more. Does that make sense?
To drive home this point and to make that caricature rather extreme, technology is the non-living stuff created by humans (note, however, that other life forms also engage in this kind of behavior — for example: birds build nests out of stuff we can consider to be more or less “non-living”).
Roughly speaking, humans employ technology (or technologies) to extend or enrich their own lives (or simply to make their lives more “comfortable”).
I want to argue that this is only acceptable up to a certain point. My ballpark estimate (or first approximation) of that point is: if there is another life form which has a higher survival rate (at a certain age) then it is still permissible for humans to extend their own lives by employing technology. In the extreme case, this also becomes ridiculous — in other words: since some plants live to be many hundreds of years old, it could be argued that humans would therefore also be allowed to extend their lives for hundreds of years using technology.
Therefore, I want to hasten to add the following exception. The technology employed by humans is unwarranted if it can be shown to decrease the survival rate of any other life form.
My “gut feeling” hunch is that this exception would pretty much make any use of any technology unwarranted.
I think where the devil is in the details is how certain we are able to become of anything — and here again: nothing is 100% certain (or 0% certain, or 100% uncertain, or whatever).
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