Posthuman Blues

Whitley Strieber sums up one of my own lurking suspicions. In the process, he casts light on the nature of the "cryptoterrestrial" civilization I suspect shares the planet with us:

Strange Days

I think our ancestors had what I like to call 'exquisite instincts.' I do not think that their civilization was technologically prolific like ours is, or we would see more debris than a few batteries and some exquisitely fashioned gear mechanisms.

Think, if you went forward a few thousand years and looked at the debris we had left behind. There would be rusting 747s, reefs of styrofoam cups, the remains of buildings, roads and bridges all over the planet.

That's not what we see from the distant past. What we see are a few fabulously engineered monuments and a number of inexplicable objects such as the Baghdad battery and the mysteriously hollowed out diorite jars of the Egyptians.

I suspect, though, that they were indeed more advanced than we are. They would, perhaps, not have been able to tell you the math behind what they were building, or show you a plan, but that was because their intelligence, which was at least as great as ours, was still rooted in their natural being, not resident exclusively in their reason.

To have a future, we must regain exactly that about our own past selves. We must re-awaken our exquisite instincts, the ones we are so out of touch with that we don't even realize that they exist.