“In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.”(Bradbury, 906) Is this the house we have imagined? “There Will Come Soft Rains” says that, yes, we can build magnificent machines: beautiful houses to cater to our every need, a thousand servants at our beck and call, yet what benefit will they be at the end? When we fry ourselves into small radioactive fragments because we can sooner built houses fit for gods, then learn to live in peace with our fellow mortals, what good will our machines be to us then?
In this essay, the loyal family dog searched uselessly for his masters. The house tried in vain to save itself from the fires, but their efforts to save their masters were ludicrous, for the master race had exterminated itself and left the servants all alone, impotent. Not one of man’s creations could stand at the day of reckoning and save him from extinction- nor would many mourn his passage. This is a humbling thought that our planet would survive quite well without us. Were we to rid it of our presence, and that in just a short while, it would almost be as if we had never existed at all.
Times have changed since the writing of “There Will Come Soft Rains”, when the threat of nuclear extermination seemed more real than it is now. But should we read it only as a chilling view of what the future might have been? One thing in man’s favor: he is ingenious; and in inventing new ways of making his species extinct he has in many ways surpassed himself.
This Is A Descriptive Essay About My House
Upon entering my house, you notice the mismatched brown and blue plaid couches under bare walls. A huge television blocks the only window in the room, with an old scratched coffee table groaning under a weeks worth of mail. Guacamole colored shag carpet over powers the cheap Asian rug trying to smother it. The blue and brown couches are as comfortable as reclining on bales of straw covered with ...
If not by nuclear war, than humanity could perish in dozens of other manners: pollution could choke our food supply or kill the plants that produce our oxygen, or we could use up all our resources and be left with billions of people and the infrastructure to support less than one thousandth of that number, or we could destroy our atmosphere and let natural radiation kill us. A madman or a terrorist might engineer a virus to kill all homo sapiens, or one might be loosed on accident by a well-meaning brilliant fool. And how impossible really is a nuclear holocaust? It is not just the large superpowers that are building up arsenals now, but every little country with delusions of grandeur; the more nukes around, the more chance that someone will use one.
The most colossal insult to man’s pride in our “New World Order”, in our interpretation of relative calm as true peace, in our belief in the circus of being on the verge of true and lasting security, is that the end could come by an accident: a careless mistake, a deadly misunderstanding, a fatal lack of communication, a failure to act when the ability to prevent a dreadful disaster would be within our grasp. In our arrogance we do not see the thin rope that we walk, and so we continue joyously with our everyday affairs, building our lives of luxury and our castles in the air. Until one day our mistakes cause everything our race has ever achieved to be obliterated. That our society is designed so that such obliteration could come by accident proves how precarious our situation has proven to be that “There Will Come Soft Rains” has the very real possibility of becoming our future, if our overconfidence in our immortality persists. “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…” (Bradbury, 911) but nobody answers; This can be our real future.
