How useful would it be to dwell on our past from time to time. Our past as a species, that is.   Perhaps it will help us to understand the present, and where we’re going with all of this, as for the moment I cannot pretend to understand much of the present at all. But – so the theory goes – if you look back to see in what direction we have been going, and to examine the things we have done in the past, you might get an inkling that we actually have a goal in mind – intentionally or not – to which we’re striving.

And so I wonder what it would have been like at the very beginning of our species, to leave the bush and our animal past, and start taking steps towards becoming the human being of the present. What was it that motivated us to evolve into a direction that  appears radically different  from our animal past, and in more ways that I can think of.

Some will probably want to debate me on this point as they will claim that this is a difference of degree and not of kind, but I would want to claim that our behaviour is substantially different from any other animal although there are many aspects of it that clearly hark back to our shared animals past.

However this might have come about, it will have taken a few hundred thousand years to evolve from beast to homo sapiens and to arrive at that apparent difference between us and the animal that we still very much are.

However, we no longer just live in our environment and accept it for what it is.  Instead, we  manipulate it, artfully, craftily, and  – unfortunately – more often than not destructively,  in order to sustain us, and to restructure it as we see fit, even if this would be to our own detriment, and perhaps risk our own extinction.

Substantively, though, what are we aiming for, or what do we want?  Given the state of the world today,  all I can see is  mass bewilderment, a morass of sociopolitical and ideological strategies and their ensuing variations in inequities. No, we really don’t know where we’re going with all of this– an entire planet full of people, lost in space.  And we’re the only aliens out there.