Read Better Angels for Free Online Page B

gathered, used to be rather like the jellyfish, nomadically drifting about the world. Eventually, however, we settled down and begin to secrete cities and civilizations around ourselves. Think of the ‘reef’ as the growth of human populations throughout history, along with our ‘excretions,’ all our trash and toxins, all the buried cities beneath and just outside our cities. The reef is the conversion of what is ‘not us’ into us and our products. The reef is that something reaching toward the light, as the past it is built upon sinks slowly deeper into darkness. The ‘ship’ is the full set of possible human scientific and technological capabilities. The ‘ocean’ is the medium of spacetime.”
    Paul stared at the colorful reef in the tank, not yet catching Vang’s meaning.
    “But what does it mean to say we will become the ‘reef of our own shipwreck’?” he asked, still trying to puzzle out that saying’s weird non-dual duality.
    “What if we don’t learn to turn all our rubbish into resources?” Vang said. “What if our reproductions and toxic productions outpace our capacity for invention? What if our biology and our technology converge in a mutually destructive fashion? What if we persist in our deep denial of the paradoxical fact that our very success as a species is the single greatest threat to our future survival as a species?”
    Suddenly Paul got what Vang was driving at. Watching the pleasant play of fish round and about stone, he suddenly saw the underwater scene more darkly, as if an unseen cloud had passed across the face of an unseen sun.
    “Then the ship will crack up on the reef,” he said quietly, “spewing toxins that will kill the reef in turn. A pretty grim scenario.”
    “Potentially, yes,” Vang said. “The two best alternatives to it would seem to be either learning to control the rate of the reef’s growth or, failing that, leaping out of the ocean entirely, toward that ‘light’ beyond space and time that we’ve always been growing toward. That’s where your fungus comes in.”
    Paul stood up—still a bit wobbly, despite the coffee—trying to imagine coral polyps leaping from the ocean and flying like pulsing jellyfish toward the sun. He looked at Vang.
    “Sounds like you’re talking about either something for controlling population growth or for travelling faster than light,” Paul said with a small smile. “I really have no idea how that fungus I brought back could help with either one.”
    “You don’t?” Vang said, as if he didn’t quite believe Paul. The older man walked into the ellipse of the bar. “My associates and I do. We have several ideas—and we are willing to pay you quite lucratively for the right to investigate those possibilities.”
    Vang gestured at a thinscreen document which had at that moment appeared in the top of the bar. Paul scanned the document, which read his eyes as he read it, so that it obligingly went to the next page each time he finished the previous one. The document, he saw, was a contract between Paul Larkin and something called the Tetragrammaton Consortium. The contract made Paul both a consultant and senior research scientist with Tetragrammaton, in addition to paying him quite handsomely for the right to patent any materials extracted from the Cordyceps fungus he had brought back with him from Caracamuni tepui. The amounts of money involved were extravagant beyond his most avaricious dreams.
    When he had finished reading the document, he straightened up, stunned.
    “Does the contract not meet with your approval?” Dr. Vang asked, concerned.
    “Wha—?” Paul asked, disoriented. “No, it’s fine. Generous.”
    “Good, good!” Dr. Vang said. “But then, what’s the problem?”
    “I’m not sure,” Paul said. “It’s just that this is all happening so fast, like some kind of anti-James Bond scenario.”
    Vang smiled broadly, pleasantly surprised by the Bond comparison. Maybe it brought up some kind of