Galapogos by Kurt Vonnegut

This is a blog post I have pulled out of the many text files that sit on my computer with unfinished thoughts. I have attempted to finish this thought.

31 March 2010

Today on my way to the airport I finished reading 'Galapogos' by Kurt Vonnegut. This is a classic American post-world war 2 science fiction novel, in which the author as a disembodied ghost watches the end of human history and our emergence through an intense genetic bottleneck to become a new species. With a large serving of irony, Vonnegut centers the final resting place of humankind on the Galapogos islands, where Darwin made so many of his observations about the way species adapt to fit niches.

The book finishes with a motley collection of survivors stranded on the Galapogos island of 'Santa Maria', while the rest of humanity perishes through a combination, of financial collapse, famine, social unrest, war, all rounded off by the emergence of a disease that renders the remainder of humanity infertile.

The species that emerges on the Galapogos islands from the small number of survivors is a water dwelling species with flippers and a very simple life cycle.

As I finished the book, it occurred to me that this story seems more likely in the present day than it did at the time of writing. When it was written it was simply yet another pessimistic story of nuclear disaster. Now however, we live in a time of seemingly unstoppable terrorist cells, man-made climate change and catastrophic economic conditions brought about through willful neglect by people who should know better. There seems to be more reasons to believe now than ever before, that we will be responsible for our own demise.

Climate change in particular seems to lend a great deal of credence to the notion that in our future we may take on a largely different form. We know that species adapt to their environments, and our physical form has remained unchanged through a period of relatively unchanged climate. If we do shift the climate into another large scale pattern (which now seems likely), then evolutionary processes will again have something to chew on. If our future kind live on a hot wet planet, then perhaps becoming marine life is our destiny.