The evolution of "Humanity's Ambition"

Dubos notes that the Sumerian word *namlulu* drifted from meaning "mankind" to meaning something like "behave like mankind should" — so that a father could scold his son for neglecting his humanity while chasing wealth and pleasure. Five thousand years later, the same tension runs through every text on human ambition, but the escape route keeps scaling up. O'Neill's *High Frontier* proposes that the problems created by ambition on Earth — poverty, tyranny, ecological ruin — can be solved by redirecting that ambition into space, and he finds historical proof in the pattern that humanity's proudest eras were times of "diversity, competition, unpredictability, and considerable confusion," never times of consolidation. Kelly's *Out of Control* quietly demolishes the premise underneath both positions: humans are no more evolved than bacteria, progress is a "human-induced illusion," and the expanding sphere of life has no apex. Yet Sagan, writing between O'Neill and Kelly, performs an extraordinary sleight: he acknowledges we are marginal wisps in a dusty corner, then *immediately* reasserts ambition by calling the jump to Mars as momentous as fish crawling onto land — while quoting Lindholm's warning that without a sacred project, we're left with "a demystified image of a frail and fallible humanity." The reading path reveals that humanity's ambition doesn't evolve so much as oscillate between the Sumerian father's accusation and the Sumerian son's refusal to hear it, with each era simply building a more sophisticated apparatus — space colonies, evolutionary theory, biospheric consciousness — to make the refusal sound like an answer.