The Greatest Mistake God Ever Made?

by lim ju boo : Chinese name lin ru wu (林 如 武)

A humorous thought dedicated to my dear brother-in-law, a senior consultant structural engineer, who has spent much of his life building concrete jungles here and there to replace the natural jungles of Eden that God created.

He affectionately reminds me that I still live in a stone cave near Batu Caves while he busily builds concrete jungles elsewhere. He also describes himself as a humble siput (sea snail)  who knows nothing and believes that when he finally goes kaput (dies), nothing remains except dark matter. Needless to say, this article is written with brotherly affection and a generous dose of humor.

 

For the first four and a half billion years of Earth's history, life was wonderfully uneventful.

When this planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, there were only the essentials: air, water, rocks, and soil. Then, about 3.6 billion years ago, the first tiny living organisms mysteriously appeared. They managed perfectly well without universities, politicians, lawyers, economists, social media, or certainly any nuclear weapons. They all lived peacefully with one another in remarkable harmony, without destroying the beautiful environment that had been graciously provided for them, and yet they survived.

Millions of years passed. Then came the Cambrian Explosion, when life suddenly became wonderfully creative. Strange creatures with too many legs, too many eyes, and very odd body plans appeared everywhere. Fish evolved, plants spread across the land, dinosaurs ruled, mammals took over, and eventually apes wandered into Asia some 15 million years ago.

Throughout all those hundreds of millions of years, nature ran remarkably well. None of these creatures ever felt the urge to "improve" nature. They lived peacefully with one another without destroying the ecosystem.

The birds sang without forming choirs. The lions never held elections to choose the King of the Jungle. Elephants never argued over property boundaries. Monkeys never invented income tax. Whales never polluted the oceans with plastic bottles. No animal held international peace conferences because none of them had started world wars in the first place.

The forests remained forests.

The rivers remained rivers.

The air remained fresh.

The soil remained fertile.

Life simply carried on.

Then, about 300,000 years ago, God had an idea.

"Let Us make Homo sapiens in Our image," somewhere in Africa.

At first, everything looked promising. God placed Adam and Eve in the beautiful Garden of Eden and gave them almost unlimited freedom. They could eat the fruit from every tree in the garden except one, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Unfortunately, there happened to be a rather persuasive talking snake nearby.

This remarkable reptile deserves a Nobel Prize for Deception. It appears to have been the first snake in history with advanced language skills, a doctorate in persuasive marketing, and an extraordinary talent for deceiving Eve, and, through her, Homo sapiens ever since. Even today, humanity still seems remarkably willing to believe every attractive lie that promises unlimited knowledge, wealth, power, or pleasure.

Instead of selling insurance policies, however, this snake promoted a very special fruit—one that offered unlimited knowledge but came with no instruction manual on how to use it wisely.

Eve accepted the fruit and also gave some to her husband, Adam.

From that very moment, humanity developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge.

Knowledge itself was never the problem.

The problem was what humans chose to do with it.

Instead of admiring the forests, they chopped them down.

Instead of enjoying rivers, they polluted them.

Instead of living beside nature, they buried it beneath bricks, cement, steel, glass, and concrete.

The beautiful Garden of Eden slowly became a worldwide collection of concrete jungles.

Humans then became wonderfully inventive.

They discovered gunpowder.

Then rifles.

Then tanks.

Then bombs.

Then missiles.

Then nuclear weapons.

Then drones.

Each invention was proudly announced as making civilization safer.

Curiously, each one also became remarkably effective at making civilization disappear.

Not content with competing against one another, Homo sapiens decided to create a new species in their own image, not from dust this time, but robots made from silicon, steel, copper, plastic, and millions of lines of computer code.

Unlike Adam, they required no rib.

Unlike Eve, they were not tempted by apples.

These new species of 'animals' created in the image of Homo sapiens simply downloaded software updates as their daily food.

Every year these robotic descendants became faster, wiser, and increasingly capable. They absorbed knowledge not from a tree in Eden but from billions of digital "trees" connected through the internet.

One day, these artificial minds may look at humanity with perfect logic and conclude:

"The principal source of planetary pollution appears to be Homo sapiens themselves who created them"

They decided to eliminate these Homo sapiens species of animals.

Having completed this removal exercise, the robots might then lovingly restore Earth's original operating system.

The skies become blue once more.

The rivers run clear.

The forests return.

The air becomes clean.

The soil becomes fertile again.

Planet Earth quietly resumes the peaceful lifestyle it enjoyed for hundreds of millions of years before Homo sapiens animals arrived to "improve" it.

If that day ever comes, somewhere in Heaven God may glance down at Earth, smile gently, and say:

"I created humans to take care of the Garden.
Instead...
they created robots to take care of the humans."

Perhaps the greatest irony in history is that the only species clever enough to invent artificial intelligence may also become intelligent enough to invent its own replacement.

Perhaps the Tree of Knowledge was never the problem.

Perhaps the missing tree was the Tree of Wisdom.