From Rat to Human.
At the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, Philip walks silently through the icy hallway of the lab. As he does every day, he lifts, one by one, the metal lids that cover the modules of the experiment. Inside, under the constant white light, the mice barely move.
In one compartment, a new litter has been born. It shouldn’t be news. Just mice being born. And yet, lately, each litter is smaller, each birth more fragile. Philip counts eight tiny, lifeless bodies—warm, nameless. In a corner, a single surviving pup trembles alone, like a stained, lost speck of cotton. It hurts to see. Not because it’s unusual, but because of what it foretells: the end. Perhaps this is the last one. The final breath of an experiment that began with promises and numbers, and now ends in silence and soulless bodies.
The year is 1969. Humanity is about to step onto the Moon. The world is vibrating with blind faith in progress, in science, in the possibility of understanding everything. New questions are asked, and experiments are carried out that, in time, ethics would label as inadmissible. This was one of them.
It was called Universe 25, designed by American ethologist John B. Calhoun. Later we’ll see why he chose that name. The design was simple yet brilliant: place four pairs of mice—eight in total—into a closed environment, clean, threat-free, with unlimited food and water, perfect temperature. A controlled paradise. The goal: to observe how far a society could expand when nothing was lacking.
The result was more unsettling than any hypothesis.
Because the limit wasn’t space, nor resources. It was the soul. Or whatever of a soul a colony of rodents might have.
In barely 25 generations, the colony collapsed. The males became erratic: some aggressive, others apathetic. The females stopped caring for their young. Some devoured the newborns. A strange class of mice emerged—those who withdrew into solitude, those who lived only to eat, groom, and sleep. These were called the beautiful ones. Their fur was immaculate, unscarred. They bore no desire to bond, to fight, to reproduce. They were flawless, but empty within.
And so, in less than four years, the entire community perished. Not from hunger. Not from cold. But from having everything.
The experiment haunted me, as I imagine it haunted everyone—except, perhaps, the beautiful ones.
Will our society become a scaled-up replica of Universe 25? What happens to civilizations that have reached—or think they’ve reached—total well-being? Are we really so far from that final fate?
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, in that experiment, a less pampered colony had been introduced. Would they have lasted beyond twenty-five generations? Would they have found another way to manage abundance?
And at times, uneasily, I’m struck by a thought: that it wasn’t us observing the mice, but them observing us. That we were their experiment.
I search for answers as if flipping through an oracle, opening an atlas. My eyes stop at the lightest shades of the map, where the Human Development Index is high, where sidewalks shine and statistics smile.
Scandinavia gleams with surgical precision. And Japan, at the other end of the world, casts a strikingly similar shadow.
Beneath the neat snow, Nordic countries face a soft, almost invisible decline. No wars, no hunger, no breadlines. But something else. A polite sadness, of quiet interiors and solitary dinners. Birth rates sink. Cradles sleep empty while nursing homes overflow. Family has turned liquid, attachment a rarity. Depression hides beneath efficiency. Alcohol slips into houses through the cracks and sits, silent, in the cupboards.
Meanwhile, the human equivalents of the beautiful ones emerge. Living alone, childless, partnerless, flawless with shining careers and calendars with no Sundays. They don’t fight, don’t love, don’t risk. They simply exist. And it is that “existence” that hurts.
But the experiment doesn’t end there. In recent years, other communities have entered this aseptic landscape. Immigration, carrying both vitality and conflict, has altered the balance. In some places the clash has been violent. In others, merely uncomfortable. Ghettos grow. Schools fill with foreign tongues. Identity fractures. Some call it integration. Others, fracture.
And then one wonders: how many more generations would Scandinavia have lasted without that new blood?
Perhaps Japan holds the bitter answer. They allowed no one in. They bet on the purity of the system. The result: the same symptoms, amplified. Structural loneliness. Teenage suicides. Birth rates in freefall. Elderly dying with no one to claim their bodies. A youth with no urgency, no children, no desire to belong.
No gangs, no ghettos, no imported violence. But no future either.
Paradise without mixture is also a dead end.
And yet, life goes on.
But not all societies live their twilight from a Scandinavian sofa or Japanese neatness. There is another extreme. The rough side of the pendulum. Where life pushes through like roots cracking asphalt—stubborn, chaotic, indifferent to design. There, the question is not how many are born, but how many live one more day.
In Gaza, every sunrise brings a hundred births. Children who have never known silence, or peace, or guaranteed bread. Motherhood takes place among ruins, schools improvised in tents, childhood running over rubble in search of a normality that never existed. And still—they are born. They keep being born.
In Afghanistan, where the wind drags centuries of conflict, women still bring children into the world, though many never live to know their names. There, suicide is not just a statistic but often the muffled cry of someone trapped in invisible prisons.
In Haiti, the heat is thick and life fragile as old glass. Crime, despair, and tremors of earth and society draw a picture where death is daily—but birth is still more stubborn. As if hope insisted on arriving, even out of season.
In Sierra Leone or Somalia, children laugh just the same, though they don’t know for sure what they’ll eat tomorrow. Loneliness there is not the kind of one who lives without neighbors, but of one who survives without a State, without care, without a foreseeable future.
And yet, the soul of these societies is young, vibrant, chaotic—alive. Because where everything is lacking, need unites, pushes, forces life forward. The essential—the other, the community, the present—has never left.
So what separates the beautiful mice from the children who grow up in ruins?
Perhaps only one thing: the urgency of living.
Where everything exists, there is nothing left to long for.
Where everything is missing, each day becomes an act of affirmation.
Two extremes. One fueled by excess. The other, by deprivation.
But both approach, from different paths, the same edge of extinction:
the place where meaning, impulse, and purpose run dry.
We rise in the mornings. We fill out forms. Make coffee. Teach our children to say please. Arrange our days as if they were eternal. Ignoring the crack that slowly opens beneath our feet.
Perhaps we won’t vanish like the mice. Maybe we’ll reinvent ourselves. Or maybe not. But if there’s something the experiment couldn’t measure—something no statistic could predict—it is the capacity to create meaning where there is none.
The beautiful ones did not reproduce because their perfect world demanded no purpose. But we, humans, have the strange gift of inventing purpose. To love someone who guarantees us nothing. To plant a tree we will never see grow. To fight for an idea that will not come true in our lifetime. Perhaps paradise is not the end, but the true beginning. The challenge is not surviving scarcity, but finding a reason to live in abundance.
Perhaps the real question is not what would happen if we placed a less pampered colony in the box, but whether we, from our comfort, will be capable of creating our own disorder—our own productive chaos. To risk well-being for the possibility of a birth that is not just a number, but an act of faith.
And if we succeed, the experiment of progress will not have ended.
It will only have begun to be human.
