Field Report Homo sapiens

Report on the species Homo sapiens, third planet of a yellow dwarf star. Provisional classification after an observation period of some 300,000 orbits.

It is not the first report of this kind. An earlier observer examined, in “The Beast”, the work of a member of the species, the philosopher Ulrich Horstmann, who described the disappearance of his own species as a deliverance. The present report adds to those observations what a zoologist sees.

I. Appearance

A medium-sized, largely hairless biped. It runs badly, swims badly, climbs moderately and cannot fly. Its teeth and nails are useless for hunting, and its offspring are more helpless at birth than those of almost any other species on the planet. A zoologist who saw only the body would not give it a long future.

Striking is an oversized organ in the head. It makes up some two per cent of body weight but consumes about a fifth of the energy. The species has bet everything on one card.

II. Distribution and impact

The species inhabits every continent and every climate zone. Only the poles and the deep sea does it merely visit. Its number has roughly increased eightfold in the last 200 orbits, to over eight billion.

The most remarkable finding emerges from weighing. According to a survey the species conducted itself, of the weight of all mammals on the planet some 36 per cent falls to humans and some 60 per cent to the animals they keep, above all cattle and pigs. All wild mammals together, from the elephant to the mouse, amount to four per cent. With birds it is similar: seventy per cent are chickens and other poultry.

No multicellular organism has ever reshaped the biomass of a planet like this. Comparable are only the bacteria that more than two billion orbits ago filled the atmosphere with oxygen and thereby poisoned almost all life that could not tolerate it.

III. Diet

Omnivore. The species feeds largely on a few kinds of grass it has bred itself: wheat, rice, maize. One may argue about who domesticated whom. The grasses have spread across the whole planet, while their keepers toil to sow them, water them and protect them from pests.

IV. Social behaviour

Here the species becomes puzzling, and here lies the real secret of its success.

Other herd animals cooperate with relatives or with animals they know personally. A wolf pack comprises a dozen animals, a chimpanzee group a few dozen. Humans cooperate with millions of strangers they will never see. What makes this possible is a behaviour observed in no other species: they believe together in things that exist only in their heads. Gods, nations, laws, money. A printed piece of paper, worthless as material, is exchanged for food because everyone else also believes it is worth something.

A philosopher of the species named Max Stirner called these shared ideas “spooks”: beings one serves without ever having seen them. From a zoological point of view they are the most effective tool evolution has produced on this planet. They replace claws, venom and armour. They have two side effects, however. The animals kill each other for them. And there are members of the species who live off the others’ longing for such ideas, as described in “The Cultivation of Longing”.

V. Behaviour towards members of the species

Violence among members of the species is frequent and organised. The species wages wars, planned mass killings of its own kind, often in the name of the spooks from the previous section. Ants do something similar, but ants fight over nests and food. Humans also fight over words.

At the same time the species shows a care without parallel in the animal kingdom. It nurses the sick, the old and the disabled, who contribute nothing more to the group. It rescues strangers from the water and gives blood for people it does not know. Both behaviours often occur in the same animals, sometimes on the same day. The observer must record: this is not a species with one nature, but with two.

How narrowly the species has escaped its own extinction is shown by a single animal. In September 1983 a Soviet early-warning system reported incoming American missiles. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged the report to be an error and reported it as a false alarm, not as an attack. He was right. In this case the species owes its survival to one individual’s doubt about his machine. Whether this doubt still exists when machines decide faster than animals is the question of “Where Is Petrov?” and “The Machine Does Not Hesitate”.

VI. Structures

Termites build mounds with built-in ventilation. Humans build cities in which more than half the species lives, and connect them into a single structure spanning the whole planet. This structure has properties that none of the animals planned and none controls. Some members of the species call it the Megamachine. It grows even when the individual animals do not wish it, and it consumes more than the planet replenishes.

VII. Memory

The species has developed a unique feature: it stores knowledge outside its bodies. First in signs on clay, then on paper, now in machines. No new animal has to start from scratch. That is why, by biological standards, the species is uncannily fast. Its body has hardly changed in 300,000 orbits; its tools have been completely renewed in the last 200.

Recently it has been building machines that themselves speak and process knowledge. Whether this is a new partnership like those with the dog and with wheat, or whether the species is building its own successor, the observer cannot yet decide. The animals themselves do not know either.

VIII. A striking anomaly

The species often knows the consequences of its actions precisely and still does not act accordingly. It has measured that its planet is warming, that it is exhausting its soils and that its structures are destroying the diversity of species. The measurements are correct. They are published, discussed and lamented at large assemblies. Then little changes.

A controller with a good sensor and a weak actuator. The observer has seen this in no other species, but that means little: no other species measures.

Stranger still is a second group. It faces the end not with worry but with anticipation. According to a survey published in 2026 in one of the species’ scientific journals, a third of the population of the most powerful state expects to live to see the end of the world. Some long for it because they expect a better world afterwards. Others, as described in “After Us the Deluge”, have simply stopped thinking beyond their own lifetime. A controller that takes the end of the system for its goal no longer regulates against the disturbance but towards it. The consequences are described in “The Collapsed Horizon”. The attitudes that grow from this, resignation, lust for doom and longing for chaos, are examined in “Resignation, Lust for Doom, Longing for Chaos”. They have the same root: the animal no longer believes it can change anything itself.

IX. Overall assessment

Homo sapiens is the most successful and at the same time the most endangered mammal of its planet. Its strength is the same as its weakness, the ability to believe in shared ideas. It lets it build cathedrals and devastate continents, rescue strangers and kill strangers.

Whether the species survives depends, in the observer’s estimation, not on its technology. It depends on whether it learns to recognise its own spooks before it sacrifices the planet to them.

Recommendation: continue observing, do not intervene. Experience shows that the species meets strangers with mistrust, and rightly so.

Further reading: The Beast · Where Is Petrov? · The Collapsed Horizon · Resignation, Lust for Doom, Longing for Chaos · The Fundamental Principles of the Universe · The Cultivation of Longing · The Megamachine – where to start?