Let There Be Civilisation

I have come to the conclusion that light is quite important.  After all without light we couldn't tell which parts of the planet need dusting.  Just think how difficult vacuuming would be without light.  You wouldn't be able to find a power point and you'd be reduced to using one of those old manual carpet sweepers.  I think we can all agree that nobody wants to return to those dark days.

So, as you can see light is very important.  Unfortunately the Sun only provides it for half the day.  It has to be admitted that this is rather tedious.  In fact it really isn't good enough.  Imagine if your power company only provided electricity for half the day.  Would you honestly consider that satisfactory?  No, there would be outrage, complaints and a refusal to pay for such shoddy service.  Some might argue that the Sun provides its service free.  Very true but let's face it, nobody is going to pay for a light service which goes out at night.  If it were anything else we wouldn't put up with it but because its the Sun we just shrugged our shoulders and started working on fire.

Working on fire turned out to be a rather brilliant idea.  The discovery of fire is regarded as one of the most important steps in human development and rightly so.  Before fire we were merely flea bitten apes huddling together against the cold and dark.  Once we got fire we became flea bitten apes huddling together tending burns and scalds.  A much better result I think you will agree.  Fire enabled us to cook food thus inadvertently inventing cooking.  It helped us to keep warm (vitally necessary since we were foolish enough to do part of our evolving during an ice age) and it help protect us from predators (although, again, the light probably attracted as many as it drove off).  Perhaps the most important thing fire did was give us time to think.  Before fire the productive day ended at sunset and all we could do was lie down and wait for dawn.

After the discovery of fire we were able to stay awake longer but since we could hardly illuminate the whole world we were pretty much restricted to our caves.  This combination of wakefulness and immobility prompted thought (and probably terrible arguments but let's look at the upside shall we).  Of course our first attempts at thinking were clumsy and the results manifested themselves in foolish ways like cave drawings of anorexic buffaloes and parliamentary democracy.  Eventually though we gained enough experience at thinking to come up with useful ideas like the wheel and daytime television.

This is what light can do for a species; it can convert them from cave dwelling apes staring at blank walls to apartment dwelling humans staring at Days of Our Lives.  Yet there are some people who would claim that we haven't advanced.  As light drives us onward and upward we can look forward to a golden age of achievement.  As long as we can pay the power bills.  If not we'll be back to drawing buffaloes on walls.  And of course we won't be able to do any vacuuming.