Men Are Different Summary

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Author Alan Bloch, in his short story “Men are Different”, portrays a future where humans are nearly extinct and robots are the dominating species. The narrator, a robot archaeologist, investigates dead planets left in the ruins of our solar system and stumbles upon the last human. The human and the narrator communicate and travel together until the narrator kills the last of the human race during a operation. The actions of the narrator throughout the story demonstrate their misunderstanding of human nature, and ultimately how taking action without prior knowledge can have serious consequences. Bloch’s purpose developed through his short story is to warn readers about the consequences that can result from ignorance and still acting without …show more content…

Much like how the narrator killed the last human because of his ignorance toward human anatomy, the world today is full of ignorant people who still take actions without knowing the possible results and consequences. An example of human ignorance in the past that resulted with multiple negative consequences was the United States dropping a nuclear bomb in Hiroshima, Japan. This action was never attempted before, and thus the United States did not know the consequences at the time and ignorantly dropped the bomb on Japan leading to Hiroshima being uninhabitable for years. It also resulted with the Soviet Union developing their own nuclear weapons leading to the lengthy Cold War, and still today there is fear about the North Korea nuclear crisis with the country developing nuclear weapons to threaten the United States. One ignorant action in the past lead to many unintentional consequences that still affect us in the present. However, much like the narrator now knows that men are different than their species, countries around the world are lowering their number of nuclear weapons as a result of the bombing of Japan. Ignorance is important to have so that we may learn from our mistakes, but acting on ignorance may result in serious and unwanted consequences: it is a balancing act that we all must learn in order to