In the fraudulent words of the prophet Bokonon, “God created mud. God felt alone. Then God said to some of the mud, 'Sit down!'” (Vonnegut 220). Hence the creation of man. Unfortunately despite all the mud, some of them decided that the only thing missing from life was a way to end it. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle takes a satirical look at the short-sightedness and arrogance in man's approach to new technologies. In the novel, one of the designers of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, invents a way for military commanders to solidify muddy battlefields into a hard surface, perfect for tanks and soldiers to traverse. The material created by Dr. Hoenikker, ice-nine, causes water it comes into contact with to instantly freeze at abnormally high temperatures. A single crystal in a body of water catalyzes an immediate transformation into a frozen dead zone. While Dr. Hoenikker had no intention of releasing the ice-nine into the world, his children quickly find a way to put it lovingly into the hands of a dictator. called "Papa" Monzano, ruler of an abjectly poor island nation called San Lorenzo. The inhabitants of the island believe in a peculiar religion developed by the aforementioned Bokonon, who resides on the island. Despite knowing full well that their beliefs are based on lies, or foma in the local patois, the people, and ultimately the narrator, consider themselves practitioners of Bokononism. With terminal cancer incurable, the dictator of San Lorenzo ingests ice nine and is immediately transformed into ice. In a series of unfortunate events, his body falls into the sea and begins the transformation of all the water into ice-nine. In a few days, the entire world is frozen and life begins its inexorable slide dragging... middle of paper... the mysteries of our universe, but also has the potential for catastrophic ruin. As Bokonon says, we are just mud, but we still have the power, and perhaps the will, to destroy everything. With technological progress effectively unstoppable, the only thing we as a world can do is hope that dangerous technology is treated with the respect it deserves. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle only outlines the danger that an innocently ignorant person can pose to life on Earth, but fails to recognize the willfully ignorant who believe they are doing what is right. While this point does not completely invalidate Vonnegut's argument, it provides a counterpoint that must be recognized by the scientific community as new and more dangerous ideas are made into reality. Works Cited Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle: A Novel. 15th ed. Dell Publishing, 1998. Print.