Do tools and weapons make us human?



Do weapons and tool use make us human?

I am currently watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Call it research for what life will be like in the early days of the High Frontier. In particular, I am interested in the spaceships. Pretty much for film and television, it is 2001: A Space Odyssey and StarCops if you are interested in attempts to make the early High Frontier space vehicles realistic.

Nevertheless, I do find some things disturbing about 2001.

One of which is the thought that the movie implies that it is tool and weapon use that make us human. No monkey has ever used a tool or thought of beating his neighbor with a stick--unless there was a monolith involved.

I guess it is the fact that I have watched too many animal shows where animals are using tools or using their built-in weapons to fight with one another or kill a tasty meal of rich protein. Either that or it is the current semester of Chinese Philosophy and Religion that has warped my brain.

Early man did not survive because of tool use; they survived because they figured out how to keep a fire burning. If anything separates us from the animals, it is the use of fire. Other animals have weapons, and make a form of war on others; other animals use tools. Only mankind has harnessed fire.

Pirate Bay Trial

One of the news stories that I have been following recently is The Pirate Bay Trial.

I will admit that as a writer, I have mixed feelings about The Pirate Bay and peer to peer file sharing. On one hand, I do not like the thought that someone could rob me of potential income from my copyrights. On the other hand, there is a lot of junk published in the occult field that should not recieve the dignity of generating income for their creator.

Hopefully, I do not fall into that last category. But I probably do; remember I set the price of one of my works, the Three Officer Version of the Golden Dawn Neophyte Ritual, based on the fact that I figure that I would sell a single copy to a new budding lodge and then it would met a photocopier.

There is also the fact that many of the out-of-print books that I seek out end up going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. If they were really that special, the publishers would reprint them.

Now, I will admit using some torrents for video files. In my defense, I would like to point out that I could not find a copy of StarCops for anything close to a reasonable price.

There is also the fact that the fan generated content of Star Trek Phase II (formerly Star Trek New Voyages) is accessible though torrents. Of course, that is a non-profit operation, so they really don't care about peer to peer file sharing.

So maybe, I am a secret pirate supporter. Of course, this is like being a secret Regardie supporter. Some people understand it; other people will not.

Of course, the big argument behind the Pirate Bay trial is that the Pirate Bay is robbing movie, TV and music companies of income (I don't think that the publishing houses are terribly concerned with file sharing, but I could be wrong).

I am sorry, but the honest truth is that the companies are still not going to get the income even if they somehow manage to shut down all torrent sites. We will just have people doing this in other ways---"Bring your flash drives and I will give you a copy of the lastest season of Prison Break..."

We are living the opening days of a brand new business model (think of the days of rampant copying of other people work during the days of the early printing press). Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain News are going to fall due to losing classified ads to the internet, and mass media companies are going to have to figure out ways to sell their stuff on the internet despite the fact that the internet is as secure as an unguarded chicken in the same room as my cat.

Looking into my cracked crystal ball, I can make a prediction: twenty years from now, none of us will believe that the Pirate Bay was a real issue considering the new business model that we will end up with when media creators catch onto how to make money despite the internet file sharing capabilities.