Arms Race to the Finish LIne

There are scholars who argue convincingly that the beginning of the end for humanity came about 8000 years ago with the development of agriculture, which led to specialization. Individuals were needed to fill specific roles, and thus was born the idea of "jobs." (And by the way, the job of turning wheat into flour gave us the term "the daily grind," but I digress.) And because man was no longer wandering far and wide in search of the best hunting, or ripest berries, another bad idea sprang up, the need to stake out a claim to "property" and protect it from all intruders, including those who still hadn't given up wandering and figured out that they could just wait until after harvest and steal the flour from the settlers. The settlers meanwhile figured out two new specialties were needed to help protect their flour, weapons maker and security guard. Eventually pretty much everybody had property, but none of them were satisfied they had enough so they began trying to steal each other's lands, which led to bigger and more powerful weapons and a new and improved kind of security guard called a soldier. We all know the rest, it led to a vicious cycle of everyone trying to protect their lands and flour against everyone else, as nobody was ever satisfied and the weapons got bigger and bigger. Meanwhile nobody noticed that the weapons had got so big and powerful they could now not only destroy their adversaries' flour, they could render the land useless for growing more flour for centuries to come. Man had been around for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture came along 8000 years ago. 8000 years. That's a drop in the bucket.