A future consistent with the present predicts that I'm going to kill my closest cousin. The outlook is poor. His life is in critical danger. I've been abusing him since the beginning of my existence. The better my financial situation, the more I'm convinced I'm going to kill him, because an easy way for me to find stability is to hurt him. I am consumed by greed. The more stable I become, the more I am prone to such unstable behavior.Interestingly, he and I are not very different. We have no quarrels. There is nobody that resembles me quite as much-and my medical history suggests that having a living family member will be essential to prolonging my life. I have no siblings, I have no parents, and I have no other relatives. I might as well be killing myself. We are almost 99 percent identical in the most important areas of our genome. The genes that code for the proteins, which build and maintain our bodies, differ only by 1.2 percent.

The animalistic concept of murder for gain may sound unfamiliar and even psychotic for a sophisticated and civilized person-but convenience is enough to murder anyone. Isn't that what mankind is about, anyway? Spill blood whenever it achieves your goals easily, and forget about the consequences of your horrific actions.

Although I will miss him, I am willing to erase my kin for temporary satisfaction. I am willing to eradicate an awareness of self, a culture, and a possible plethora of medical advancement.

I am humanity. I am mankind, and new assessments predict that my cousin, the great ape, could soon be extinct in the wild. The falling numbers, as noted by Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge, UK, project that within 50 years there will be too few Sumatran orangutans to sustain a viable population. Kofi Annan argues forcibly, "The great apes are our kin ... like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools, politics, and medicines; they can learn to use sign language, and have conversations with people and with each other. Sadly, however, we have not treated them with the respect they deserve."

The Sumatran orangutan resides in Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia, and is one of the critically endangered species, along with the chimpanzee and the gorilla. "The irony is that just as things are getting better for the people of Aceh, they're getting worse for wildlife, with people collecting timber, dormant logging concessions being activated, and illegal logging," Doctor Miles told the BBC.

"As our closest living evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees are especially suited to teaching us about ourselves," said Robert Waterston, the chair of the Department of Genome Sciences of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. "We still do not have in our hands the answer to a most fundamental question: What makes us human? But this genomic comparison dramatically narrows the search for the key biological differences between the two species."

If we cannot save a species so close and important to us, how do we expect to save ourselves? If the current rate of species extinction continues, scientists warn that this puts our own existence at risk. Dr Georgina Mace, the director of science at the Institute of Zoology, in London, UK, said, "Changes in biodiversity were more rapid in the last 50 years than at any time in human history." Which, as Dr Kaveh Zahedi, also of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre reminds us, is critical because "biodiversity and human well-being just cannot be separated."

It is odd that the easiest way for humanity to create a civilized world of stability is to kill itself. It is distressing that for humanity to rise above its primitive needs and desires it will kill nature. For example, the people of Aceh-who have suffered 29 years of conflict between the Indonesian government and separatist rebels-are now beginning to build their economy in ways that are hurting the great apes.

It isn't odd, however, that this stability will not last and our intended progress will lead to destruction. The nature of humanity doesn't include stability, because the road to stability is much harder and less convenient without careless destruction.