We Are Never Building Alone

What would become of a group of people, any age, set down somewhere stripped of everything we call civilisation, left to see what they make of it? It sounds like a fantasy. But history has already tested something close to it, not as an experiment anyone designed, but as something that happened to a few populations by accident. The results are stranger, and more useful, than either the hopeful answer or the cautionary one.

Around five hundred years ago, a group of Polynesians sailed from mainland New Zealand to the Chatham Islands, a remote scattering of land far out in the southern ocean. Those who stayed became the Maori, and as their population grew and land grew scarce, their society organised increasingly around territory and war. Those who left developed, in isolation, into the Moriori, and arrived somewhere almost opposite. Their most striking innovation was not a tool but a law, attributed to an ancestor named Nunuku, forbidding killing under any provocation. Disputes were settled with the first blow drawn and no more. It held for generations. When Maori invaders reached the Chathams in 1835, the Moriori, true to Nunuku’s law, largely chose not to fight back, and were killed or enslaved in large numbers. It is a devastating ending. It is also, unmistakably, evidence for the instinct I keep circling back to. Given enough time apart, a group can arrive at values genuinely unlike the ones they inherited, not a rerun of the parent culture in a new location.

But isolation does not reliably produce discovery, and a second natural experiment complicates the first. Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia around ten thousand years ago, when rising seas closed the land bridge between them. The Aboriginal Tasmanians stranded there did not accumulate new technology over the following millennia. According to the archaeological record studied by Rhys Jones, they lost some of what they had, certain bone tools and fishing methods simply disappear from the sites over time. The anthropologist Joseph Henrich argues this is not really a story about individual cleverness. Technological complexity, in his account, depends less on any one person’s insight than on the size and connectedness of the group holding the knowledge between them, closer to a collective memory than an individual one. Shrink the network enough, and knowledge can be lost as easily as it is gained. So the honest answer to what a group would arrive at, left alone on an island, is that it depends. Sometimes you get Nunuku’s law. Sometimes you get quiet forgetting. Isolation is not a guarantee of insight. It is simply an open door, and what walks through it is not up to the island.

What walks through that open door is not only knowledge, or the loss of it. It is also appetite, which raises a stranger question than what a group would build. It raises whether they would still want to leave the island, whether a group raised this way would still want to go to space. The case for yes has real weight. Every person alive descends from a population that walked out of Africa roughly sixty thousand years ago and did not stop until it had crossed every ocean and continent within reach, one of the more restless projects any species has undertaken. And yet the Moriori, once they reached the Chathams, did not keep sailing. The Tasmanians, once the sea closed behind them, did not rebuild the boats that might have reopened it. The same species that crossed a planet, given enough isolation and time, seems just as capable of settling and staying settled. Animal migration looks like the same restlessness at a glance, birds and whales covering enormous distances twice a year, but it resolves into a loop rather than a frontier, the same route, home again by a particular season, never a staging post for the next horizon. I have not found much evidence, anywhere else in nature, of a species treating expansion as open ended the way we have with space, each new reach simply proposing the next, not closing the loop. Whether that makes the reaching a flaw particular to us, or a phase any sufficiently curious species passes through before learning how to be still, I cannot answer from here. But it is the same question wearing a new outfit. Are we discovering the actual shape of the human animal out there past the atmosphere, or repeating the specific, unfinished story of the last several thousand years, louder, with better engines?

All three of these threads assume the island is populated entirely by us, people learning from, forgetting alongside, or straining against, other people. The more unsettling version drops that assumption too, and asks what becomes of someone raised by whoever, or whatever, happens to be there. The story of Tarzan, and the real feral children who inspired it, is usually told as though it settles what a human raised among animals could become. The children are measured against English, or Hindi, or whichever tongue their caretakers hoped to hear, and the verdict is failure when they do not produce it. I do not think that verdict is fair, and the assumption underneath it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. It is the same mistake linguists made for most of a century with sign language, dismissing it as gesture, as pantomime, until William Stokoe demonstrated in the 1960s that American Sign Language carries its own full grammar, every design feature linguists use to define language, just delivered by hands instead of breath. It was never a failure to communicate. It was a failure to recognise the shape the communication had already taken. Something similar may be true of a child raised among wolves. Wolves are not silent. They coordinate a pack across miles through howls, through posture, through scent marking that records territory and hierarchy and mood in ways no human nose is built to read. Vervet monkeys give distinct alarm calls for a leopard, an eagle, and a snake, and other vervets respond correctly without seeing the threat themselves, about as close to a word as anything gets outside our own species. A human immersed in that world long enough might genuinely become fluent in it, in a vocabulary of scent and posture rather than sound and syntax, with no way to demonstrate that fluency to a researcher testing for English. The documented feral child cases are too thin, and some too disputed, to prove this happened. But the principle beneath the question holds regardless. The absence of our language is not the absence of language.

Which brings me to the aliens. What strikes me is not that our science fiction updates every decade, but that so much of it does not. The same handful of images keeps reappearing across nearly a century of wildly different real technology, bald, elongated, emotionless beings, ships that move without any visible engine, communication and even combat conducted by thought alone. Rockets got faster, computers got smaller, phones went from a dial to a screen we talk to, and still the aliens in our films look almost exactly as they did in the 1950s. If these pictures were simply mirrors of whatever era produced them, I would expect them to have shifted more. Instead they sit slightly ahead of us, largely undisturbed by whatever we actually build in the meantime, which raises a question I cannot answer tidily. Where did these images come from, and is it possible that we are not dreaming up the future so much as building our way toward pictures we agreed on decades ago. Fiction has done this before. Jules Verne described a submarine before anyone had built one, and the flip phone owes an obvious debt to a communicator from a television show. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether the flying vehicles, the powers of the mind, the engines that need no fire, are less a prediction of where our hardware is heading and more an order placed decades in advance, waiting for the technology to catch up to the imagination rather than the other way around. There is real unclaimed territory that might answer that order. Dark energy makes up something like two thirds of the universe and no one yet knows what it is, and our own bodies run on bioelectric signaling researchers are only beginning to map with any precision. The frontier is there. Whether it ends up looking like the glowing rods and telepathy we keep drawing, or whether we simply build toward that picture because we have stared at it for a hundred years, is the part I cannot settle.

There is also the matter of how much say we actually have in any of this. Some days it feels like we are at war with the planet, paving over what was here before us, treating weather, soil, and ocean as obstacles to route around rather than conditions we live inside. But if it is a fight, I do not think we hold the stronger hand. Five times in this planet’s history, something, an asteroid, a supervolcano, a sudden shift in the air’s composition, has ended the vast majority of species alive at the time, without asking whether they had grown wise or careful enough to deserve to continue. Whatever we build, here or on the next planet over, is built on land we are leasing, not land we own, and the landlord has never needed our permission to end the lease. That is not a reason to stop reaching. But it might be reason enough to reach with more humility about who actually holds the outcome.

So here is where I land, for now. Every time something close to this experiment has actually happened, on the Chathams, in Tasmania, in the company of wolves, in a cinema dreaming up a distant species, the result was never a human free of culture, discovered underneath, and never a human who simply failed to learn anything. It was always a new culture, or a new language, assembled out of whatever was at hand, sometimes wiser than what came before, sometimes thinner, but never absent. Perhaps that is the real finding, and a comforting one rather than a limiting one. We are not being kept from some purer version of ourselves. We are never building alone. The island was never going to be empty, and it was never fully ours to begin with. The only question worth asking is what we do with whoever, or whatever, ends up on it with us, on a lease none of us were given the option to make permanent.