During World War II, the U.S. made the first Nuclear weapon in human history. If a nuclear weapon explodes it can destroy a city with radiation and heat in a short amount of time. It causes people and hence everything else to burn. In 1945 the first nuclear bomb was used against imperial Japan; Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Five years later in 1950, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called “There will come soft rains”, The story takes place later when an unexplained nuclear bomb left a city and all mankind in rubble and ashes. Nothing is left but an empty house. All of humanity has become extinct because of technology. The house is programmed with technology it is controlling and protecting the house. Bradbury is warning us that technology can destroy us and nature if we don't stop it.
Throughout the story the house fights to keep all nature out of the house. When a leaf would fall on the porch it is quickly discarded by the AI robots and burned in the incinerator. Bradbury says, “The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in a miniature steel jaw...it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner”(pg. 2). Technology tries to do everything that it can to keep nature out.
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The house begins to “die” at ten o’clock (Bradbury 2). A tree knocks over and crashes into the house, causing it to burn down. The house tries to fight back the fire but fails. The house's robot mice attack the fire with water. As it happens these robots fight a natural source like fire. They were being sustained by a natural resource such as water. Technology's battle against nature will always fail because it depends on natural resources and materials.
The house is used as a representation of a human body throughout the whole story it refers to the house as human. The house is consumed and unable to escape the strong fire. Bradbury states, “The pain of the house increases. It “shudders, oak bone on bone, its bare skeleton cringing,” and it screams “Fire!” All the voices in the house cry out until the fire reaches each one’s wiring and bursts their vocal mechanisms. The animals in the nursery’s moving fresco run away from the fire within the landscape.”(pg.5). The house is cringing as nature overpowers it. This is a vivid example of what the human bodies go through when an atomic bomb explodes. The technology is slowly melting and burning.
In the end, the sunrise is shown as a new beginning. There is a new day whether or not mankind is there. The house is completely destroyed in a pile of rubbish. The author states, “At dawn, as the sun rises over “heaped rubble and steam,” the clock cries out over the wreckage. It says, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”(pg.5). In other words nature will succeed where mankind and technology will fail to see a new day because they are all gone.
Throughout Bradbury’s story of nature vs. technology, human-like technology is in a constant battle.
The house is an example of how technology will try to control and destroy all of humanity and will do the same to nature. Although it is believed currently that technology will make our future better it may ruin it instead.
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