Tuesday, August 5, 2008

The Preservation of Primitive Societies Insures the Survival of Ours

There is much talk in recent years about the possibility of mass destruction to the human race. Meteors, global warming, famine, AIDS, nuclear war, all threaten to destroy the modern world in which we live. Well, the world most of us live in anyway. That got me to thinking: how would we survive if one of those scenarios played out. Would you know how to survive if 80% of humanity, and with it all our modern tools, were eradicated? No sewage, grocery stores, cars, phones, electric heating and cooling, medicine, processed clean drinking water, to be found. It's a safe bet most of humanity that survived the big event would die in short order from malnourishment and disease. We just can't survive without our modern tools. Well, except for those of us who never had modern tools in the first place.

I doubt the effect on the lives of the bushmen of Africa, the Yanomamo of South America, native groups of Indonesia, and the Aboriginal Austrailians would be nearly as dramatic. For some of the catastrophic event candidates, they wouldn't even notice. Life for them would be very much as it was, except now the fate of humanity would ride with them, as the rest of us die off in ignorance, the last members of the last great dynasty of earth: the Dinosaurs, the wolves, and the humans.

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