Neanderthal One: Straight Out Of A Laboratory

by Thomas M Easley
In the year 4050, a time of bliss on earth where robots and men live as friends, a fateful event occurs... arriving from deep space a small six ounce chunk of rock and ice falls unobserved into a deep sea.
The ice inside the rock melts and releases a virus so deadly that all humans on earth die. The robots are distraught and they vow to build new humans from DNA remains.
After many failures, the first laboratory-generated human emerges, a rough hirsute brute named Neanderthal One.
Decades after, the robots, for lack of spare parts and human foresight, die out and Neanderthal One evolves into our present day human race.
A fantastic improbability, certainly, but who's to say this hasn't happened or won't happen?
Serious human thought has been given to the number of angels that might fit on the head of a pin, "better ways to cut a cake", whether or not Pluto is a planet, and it wasn't so long ago that many believed the earth was flat.
Obviously reckless ideas attract us and enter our reality to such an extent that major aspects of human life are converted by them.
E=MC2, light contained in a glass bulb, voices travelling though wire, germs as the cause of infection are all examples of improbable ideas that came to life and changed the course of human history, and we know, most assuredly, that man was not meant to fly, nor breathe underwater, nor clone himself.
Given our past, Neanderthal One appears less absurd and even possible.
Humans, however significant we think we are, we must admit that our significance, knowledge and beliefs are an inadequate means of establishing finite parameters for objective reality.
We are prisoners of the subjective, the defined, the believed. Our only real freedom, it seems, lies in the realm of the imagination, in new ideas, guessing, observing and calculating "what ifs".
What if man past, man present and man future are not equally human or even human-like? What if mankind is a self-organising system manipulated in its perception of self by dark energy, and E=MC2 reverts to M=E divided by C2 in the afterlife?
What if all we believe to be true is not true, if perspective animates matter, if memory is merely an impersonal process for storing data, if life as we perceive it is actually death as we perceive death to be?
From morphic fields, string theory and causal dynamical triangulation, to the nano realm, metaphysics, religion and God, mystery and questions abound.
But which questions deserve human attention and resolution, the speed of galactic withdrawal from the Big Bang, reconstruction of the speed of light and gravity, the origin of God?
Finding answers requires a journey over landless territories, a reach into multiple dimensions, the laws that govern them and the relationship such dimensions and laws have to our known laws and dimensions.
The trick, however, is to successfully traverse these multidimensional non-human worlds with human consciousness intact to such a degree that human identity remains observant and measurable.
Indeed, but at what point can we actually enter these dimensions? Is it now, at this point, with this word, on this page?
Behind all that has been gathered into the human consciousness and experience, there extends a veil of shadows outside the reach of imagination that attracts imagination.
Neanderthal One is not a mere improbability. We may, in fact, have come from where we are going.