Devolution Revolution

One small step for man

This is the end

Neil Armstrong put the first human footprint on the surface of the moon in 1969, three days after my sixth birthday. The actual memory of seeing it on TV is now lost in the hundreds or thousands of reruns of the event, but I have a distinct recollection of having been told that this was the greatest achievement in all of history, the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and that it was performed by the greatest civilization planet Earth had ever had the good fortune to have hosted. Land of the free. Home of the brave. My country 'tis of thee (whatever that means). In those days America was number one with a bullet! And I believed it. I think most of us in my generation did.

We were born into a world in which even the sky was not the limit. Anything was possible and despite a few minor anomalies like the war in Vietnam, the odd political assassination or the race riots in cities all over the country, America was leading the world into the trans-planetary future of infinite possibility. It's been all downhill from that point on. Looking back from our current vantage point, I've come to see the moon landing as the high point of human evolution. It was the last time a pedestrian was celebrated and what seems like, at least from a transportation perspective, the beginning of the end of human powered locomotion.

Just as soon as NASA could figure out how to do it, they got a car up to the moon so the astronauts wouldn't have to trudge around the way Armstrong and Aldrin had had to do. That was it, Apollo 15 - the last time any American had to walk further than the car port. Should humans ever go back to the moon, my guess is that the first thing they'll do is construct an inter-crater connector (ICC). And that should kick off the next phase of human evolution: the symbiotic fusion of mammal and machine. Call it Homo Automobilis.

In the beginning

What we think of as the modern human more or less began when our primate ancestors came down from the trees and walked out onto the grasslands. To this day we maintain an irrational fondness for lawns. Just fly into any city in the southwest if you don't believe me. They're piping water hundreds of miles so they can grow grass in the desert! So, given how intrinsically defining bipedal-ism is to humans, it is amazing to see how foreign an activity walking has become to modern Americans. This fact was brought into focus for me when a couple of young nieces came to stay with my wife and me for a weekend recently. Without thinking much about it, my wife and I routinely walk to restaurants, theaters and shops in our neighborhood but when our young nieces, aged eight and eleven, were confronted by the prospect of a fifteen minute walk to get to a park, they acted as though they were being tortured.

I initially attributed their resistance to simple preadolescent slothfulness, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. They live in one of those new McMansion subdivisions where the sidewalks just mysteriously end, they are driven to school each day and there is a TV set in the family minivan. Their entire lives basically seem to be spent on a virtual sofa. They have hand-held devices with them at all times - the first thing they did upon arrival at my home was demand free WiFi access - and there is video streaming in front of them more or less twenty four hours a day. Walking to the refrigerator is about the longest distance they have to traverse without being in a car. And it turns out that in this respect, they are really just typical Americans.

"...the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy."     The Crisis in American Walking

We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

Only thirteen percent of American children walk or bike to school —  down from 50% in 1969. 23% of American children get zero exercise per day. Zero. You don't have to go farther than the nearest mall — to which, by the way I'll bet you have to drive — to see that Americans are becoming increasingly, astonishingly obese. In fact, obesity is one of the only remaining characteristics in which we can still claim to be a world leader!
    
And the funny thing about this is how resistant we are to do anything about it. Witness the recent uproar over the proposal to ban absurdly large sodas in New York. Or the kind of push back you get for insisting that our neighborhoods should be walkable. Now, I'm really happy to be an American and I'm glad we repelled the British occupiers, but equating NYC's prohibition on trans fat in restaurants and large sodas with tyranny just seems silly to me. And labeling people fascists just because they want to wean our citizens from the corporate gavage that is turning us into a nation of diabetics is just laughable. But then I guess our tricorn-hat-wearing forefathers started a revolution over a beverage, right? So maybe it's not so weird that greet limitations on our consumption of corn syrup as tantamount to the imposition of Stalinist totalitarianism.

I've consequently had no alternative but to recognize Armstrong's first step on the moon as the zenith of human evolution. After that point it's all devolution, as we walk less and sit more and slowly, inexorably become fatter and fatter, less able to even lift the weight of our ever growing bodies, transforming from Fat Bastard, past the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen phase, through the Jabba the Hutt metamorphosis and inevitably back into some kind of legless fish creatures. And we'll complain about the tyranny of anyone who tries to intervene between us and our Kröd-given right to pollute ourselves with fake food and wallow in the soothing glow of our Retina screens.

So off we go, forward into the past...