Fire

Consider a small fire. Maybe it starts with a spark, and a clump of parched grass. And fire is never steady, always dancing and flickering, but also searching. With a little luck, and some dry bushes nearby, the fire could grow. Perhaps even large enough for trees to catch. Imagine the wind picks up at the right moment, and suddenly – it’s crowning.

The front advances, consuming a growing swath of forest. Life could re-sprout from the scar, but that’s another story. For with no rain to quench it, the fire continues. It would range wider – vicious here, calmer there, depending on the fuel and air available. But eventually it encounters something very different: a coal seam, exposed on a hillside. Now things are really off. Even if the surface is extinguished, an underground coal fire can smolder relentlessly for a very long time indeed. With some persuasion, petroleum deposits might make for some spectacular fireworks.

With me so far? Good. Consider, though, if the fire came across something unusual, perhaps… a mountain of magnesium. It would burn far hotter and fiercer than ever before. Or an ocean of liquid oxygen, by some strange circumstance? Regardless, the fire could only last so long, unless… unless it began to learn. Had it always been a simple mindless hunger, or was it driven by something more? Did it ever remember that first clump of grass, and does it remember still? How about the revolution of coal?

Potentially comprehending the finite nature of its fuel supply, the fire would have to turn inwards to survive – literally, focusing and concentrating its power to such extremes that atoms themselves began to fuse. It might become a sun, that incandescent ball of thermonuclear plasma bound only by its own massive weight. With the fire’s life extended by orders of magnitude, who knows what could happen next. But I’ll tell you this. When I look at the curves of Humanity over time – in any major measure, like population or energy or information – here is what I see: I see the path traced out by God’s finger, striking a match.