Essay on Human

We, as in the people of Earth, call ourselves humans, as a way of identifying who we are as individual beings. What are you? I am human. And it does not only entail our biology, or where we are from, it says to many of us that we have compassion, and intelligence, and a soul, but it also says that we are definitely not something else. It says we have one head, a beating heart, pumping blood, a personality that we developed ourselves, and that we are certainly mammals, just without the fur. But what happens when we encounter something that is so close to a human that it is hard to tell the difference? Or even, something that is definitely human, but looks different than we do? Many people would say that they would accept it with open arms, but simply looking at historical texts would tell anyone that this is a sweet lie, and the standard reaction to something being different is contempt, disgust, and if we do not subjugate it, we kill it. And nothing describes the volatile mystery of humanity better than the tales of science fiction, with their hidden, brutally honest messages.

You don’t have to look very far back into our history to find hard evidence of this in our real, non-fictional world. The subjugation of Africa, the Holocaust, the ruthless murders of gay and trans people, and these people aren’t even from a different planet. Because of this, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest is so incredibly believable. Earth humans discover a primitive race of near human xenos, and instead of teaching them and trying to advance their society they enslave the native Ashtheans. The peaceful aliens are treated worse than animals, forced to help the humans cut down the forest the Ashtheans call their home, and are given no reward for their back breaking labor. The humans lord over the little xenos with the same air of superiority Europe had over Africa two hundred years ago. The Ashtheans are beaten, shot, worked to death, their homes are burned down, their forest cut into lumber, and, despite as being seen as equal to animals, their women are raped. But even after all of this, even after the humans are driven off the forest, the Ashtheans, or more specifically their leader, Selvar, does the most human thing done out of the entire story, he shows Davidson, the man who raped and murdered his wife, mercy. He knew Davidson would be executed by the human government, so he sent him to an island solely inhabited by Ashtheans who have gone insane. If the story was written in a way that we did not know what the race of the characters were, if Davidon, and Selvar, and Lyubov, and all the rest only had names, and at the end you were asked, “Who is the human in the story?” Selvar would be picked immediately for his compassion, his mercy, and the way he struggles with what he has to go through. So when an alien is shown to be more human than most humans, we have to ask ourselves, what does being human actually mean?

However, this is not to say that everything that appears human actually is. With technology advancing at the rate it is, and in the direction is, we have already created artificial intelligence, and undoubtedly, there will be more to come. But is it possible for a human to artificially make another human? In Brian Aldiss’s Supertoys Last All Summer Long a human woman takes care of a robot child. The robot looks just like a human boy, covered in synthetic skin and wig hair, and acts just like a human boy, almost. Like any boy, he loves his mother, and wants to spend time with