When you watch a large bird in flight almost lazily flapping a wing and gliding across the sky even with their slightly ungainly landings on tree tops you can fully understand why people have wanted wings. And even more when you see the size and noise of the machines we have built to fly in do you see how ungraceful we are and even the quiet ones have a rigidity about them because after all they are after-thoughts to our being and not a part of who we are.
Flight is to the bird what using tools is to humanity – something we don’t even think about. In their world we are copyists and in a strange way for all our brilliance, we are players on the field of nature. Nothing we make is truly ‘unnatural’ because the laws of science either enable something to exist or not and many of the things we things we have found we later find have antecedents in nature only perhaps on a smaller scale and by copying their techniques – spiders walking up walls for example – we find we can do the same (well almost). What insects are teaching us about how to glue things together at a molecular level will change manufacturing.
What we are creating are the toys children play with, the adult world of science is yet to come.