With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans
are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme,
they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through
science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a
candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as
discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are
burning on several continents, the Earth's ice sheets are melting
and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet's
coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and
humans live and grow food. With the exception of birds like hawks,
black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form
utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For
more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the
long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the
flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for
omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and
conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions,
dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up
for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is
cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the
unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive
response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict
between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex,
with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon's Last and
first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the
Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable
molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of
the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support
system."
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