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looked around,” Vang said, “and saw that human beings were simultaneously becoming obsolete and a glut on the market. Let’s say they recognized—popular media fantasies notwithstanding—that, for a global civilization once past the threat of total spasm nuclear war, the more likely and immediate dangers are not killer asteroids or alien invasions but the daily ongoing destruction of habitat occasioned by human population growth and humanity’s own expanding powers.”
    “The death of a thousand small cuts,” Paul said. “The frog in the pot under which the flame is being slowly turned up—too slowly for it to notice.”
    “Exactly,” Vang said, pleased. “As far as planetary carrying capacity was concerned, let’s say the depth planners’ most reasonable projections placed global human populations deep into an ecocatastrophic overshoot phase fifty years from their time zero.”
    “That’s glut—and maybe gluttony,” Paul said, with a nod, “but I don’t see the obsolescence.”
    Vang smiled again.
    “Even glut means obsolescence,” he continued. “For creatures like ourselves that can build artificial brains and alter DNA, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is an obsolete biological imperative.”
    Ooh boy, Paul thought. Such ideas weren’t likely to make Vang popular in the Vatican, or Salt Lake City either, for that matter.
    “But you mean the other types of obsolescence the planners might have contemplated, I suppose,” Vang continued. “Might they have asked themselves too whether, particularly since the nineteenth century, industrial mechanisms had already increasingly obviated the need for human muscle? In the twentieth century, didn’t informational mechanisms begin making many capabilities of the human mind superfluous as well?”
    “I see your point,” Paul said, not considering the idea quite so philosophically as Vang had.
    “Let’s say, then, their experts were forced to reconsider their scenarios,” Vang continued. “The older, deeper questions they asked themselves had been something like: Are we and our organizations good? Are humans good? The new questions might well have been different: not only what were they and their organizations good for, but what are humans good for?”
    “I presume they came up with an answer,” Paul said, after a downing a strong slug of coffee.
    “In their own way,” Vang said slowly, looking at the aquarium in the wet bar as if contemplating the possibilities hidden in its waters. “Maybe their own fears of the death and meaninglessness of their organizations got tangled up with their search. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say what they finally came to was the idea that human consciousness was our unique contribution—and our best hope for avoiding the doom of becoming the reef of our own shipwreck.”
    “Reef?” Paul asked, then shook his head. “I don’t quite follow you.”
    By way of answer, Vang got up and walked toward the wet bar, with its enclosed coral reef. On impulse, Paul got up and literally followed him, taking his cup of coffee in hand.
    “Do you know how a coral reef grows, Dr. Larkin?”
    Paul crouched down and looked at the miniature reef in Vang’s bar.
    “Coral polyps,” Paul said. “Soft-bodied creatures, coelenterates—kind of like jellyfish, only they settle down and secrete stony skeletons around themselves. The old skeletons are what most of the reef is made of.”
    “Exactly,” Vang said, pleased in an almost teacherly manner, “except that the polyps are actually excreting the calcium that goes to make up the stone of the reef. Like most marine organisms, they have to dispose of excess calcium, so why not use it for building? They’re not the last animal to turn a waste product into a resource, either. Not by a long shot.”
    Although he could have done without the lecture on a fine point of invertebrate biology, Paul nodded.
    “We humans,” Dr. Vang continued, “when we hunted and