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Peter Watts 63 Blindsight
what tools are for.
To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the
universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy,
they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.
Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never
thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why
invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is
abundant Why build fortresses if you have no enemies Why
force change upon a world which poses no threat
Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even
into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely
developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture.
Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still
others until they'd built cities in space.
We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled
lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—
until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in
honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her
own contentment.
But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It
only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for
existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the
best Human technology would crumble, where the environment
was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who
fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats
contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh
weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once
conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only
environmental factors that continued to matter were those that
fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that
forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive.
Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.
And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never
forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent
opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel
between the stars
The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have