© Darius A Irani, 2023
A CERTIFIABLE SPECIES
About 390 million years ago life crawled out of the oceans and began the long process of populating the land surface of our planet. During this long childhood, Nature would be interrupted five times by extinction level events. Nature did not care. It measures its progress in millions of years and millions of little changes. It just picked up the pieces and continued its inexorable journey to wherever it is going. The last extinction level event was about 65 million years ago. When it was done, the largest surviving land mammal was a tree dwelling, shrew like creature, about the size of a shoe box. The good news was that the hungry reptiles that had ruled over the plains were all gone. This allowed mammalian life to leave the safety of the trees and slowly move onto the plains. Evolution did its thing, and what we see around us is the result - an unimaginable diversity of plant and animal life.
We call our home a planet. It is a moniker that dates back two thousand years. The early Greeks could look up at the night sky and almost everything they saw reaffirmed their geocentric view of the universe. The Sun, Moon and all the stars appeared to revolve around the earth exactly as they were supposed to. However, there were seven objects whose behavior was totally unpredictable. Because they seemed to meander all over the sky, the Greeks decided to call them wanderers, which in Greek is the word planetes. What we now know is that both the geocentric and subsequent heliocentric views of the universe were totally incorrect. Our Planet is not at the center of anything. Our Sun is merely an average star in an obscure quadrant of an insignificant galaxy. The wanderer we call home is actually a spaceship. It may not look anything like the International Space Station or how Hollywood depicts spaceships, but none the less it is one. It is hurtling through interplanetary space at about 66,000 mph while managing to keep everything together and keep us alive.
Interplanetary space is about the deadliest environment a living creature can find itself in. Besides having no air, water or food, the temperature is minus 450 degrees F. At this temperature, all water-based life forms - like us - would become chunks of ice in just a few minutes. The ONLY reason we exist is because of the protection and nourishment provided by our spaceship home. Yet, in our boundless stupidity we are doing everything we can to destroy it.
On our planet, all land-dwelling creatures need four things to survive, prerequisites if you will: Air (Oxygen) to breathe; Water for hydration; Food for nourishment; and a suitable environment to live in. There is a useful rule of thumb that underscores our total dependence on these four items. We humans can only survive for about three minutes without air, three hours in dangerous temperatures, three days without water, and, three weeks without food. A few hundred years from now, if there are still any historians around, they will be astounded by our apparent determination to self destruct. What - they will wonder - drove us to pollute our air, contaminate our water, overwhelm our food producing resources, and push our environment over a brink from which it might not return. What is unconscionable is that in our selfishness and greed, we will also eradicate all the other species we share our home with.
(Would be survivalists should take heed. All the prerequisite are unyielding. Look at the whole picture. Having enough food for many years won’t do you any good if you are going to die in one week because you don’t have any potable water!)
The Last Glacial Period ended about 11,000 years ago. At that time all the species were in balance. No species had a clear advantage. Life and death were equally uncertain in the struggle to survive. For whatever reason and in whatever way, one species - humans - began to surpass all the others, both intellectually and culturally. So much so that now, we can on a whim eradicate any other species that we want to. No other species can do this. We harbor the delusion that we are modeled in the image of some deity. This somehow makes us superior to and gives us dominance over all other life that we share this planet with. Consequently, we believe that perpetuating ourselves is the highest priority, and if other species fall by the wayside, so be it.
Our greatest construction projects are miniscule in scope compared to the size of our planet. This should be a warning that if we break something we have neither the skills nor the material needed to fix it. If what we break provides one of the four prerequisites for life – life will end. Nature will not care. It has seen it all five times before. A few million years from now, new life will emerge. It may not look anything like what we now see around us, but Nature WILL survive – we won’t.
At the very core of our selfishness is our population. Some scientists estimate that our planet was designed to support about 3 billion humans. Let’s be generous and say 4 billion. Our actual population has just surpassed 8 billion. This is madness. The only other spaceship we can draw a parallel with is the International Space Station. It is designed to support a crew of seven. Would we dare to pack it with 14 humans – of course not. There would not be enough air, water or food. It would be suicidal. Why then are we doing on a scale of billions what we would not dare to do on the scale of a dozen? The answer probably lies somewhere between ignorance and complacency with a lot of greed mixed in. Our home has tolerated and absorbed our excesses for so long that we believe we can keep on abusing it with no consequences. This is a potentially fatal fallacy. We are on a spaceship. Spaceships are finite, bounded and surrounded by infinite danger. If we kick it often enough it will break. A few years from now, if what we thought were hundred year weather events start occurring annually, we will realize that it is too late. The slippery slope to extinction is not very steep, but it is merciless and implacable. We will have lots of time to do what we seem to do best - point fingers and blame each other while doing nothing!