I am struck by the consideration that in the ages of Man marked by the incessant warfare of intraspecific competition (which we yet comprise, seeing only glimmers of a future felicity in which cooperative enterprise potentiates greater individual profit than that derivable from murder and looting, that improved technology brings) from which we are transitioning, there were pressures on cultures necessitating the formation of societies that focused their entire energy on the art of war.

This lowest common cultural denominator has continually fed the cycle of conquest and empire, followed by consolidation and decline into debauchery, as technology potentiating transcendence of barbarism remained lacking.

We may live to see a future in which conquest becomes obsolete, and with it war, violence, and those torments that have always come, and characterize 'nature, red in tooth and claw'. Carlos Santana, in his astounding Fakebook profile, stated his belief that God made us to create peace in a universe knowing only war.

It is my hope that this time, civilization might transcend the intraspecific and natural cataclysms impending to at last give form to that dream of peace and joy universal prophesied by the messianic, ubiquitous in our species subconscious, and tickling even the dreams of the most barbaric warriors.

Let heaven on Earth be the fruit of our generation, that our posterity might never be able to comprehend the animal savagery of our forebears, as they emerge from our terrestrial womb in that exodus to the stars foretold by prophets of yore.