Poisonong The Air We Breathe

Comment by Vincent L. Guarisco on March 8, 2013 at 7:24pm

Here's some food for thought:

Homo sapiens is an odd species, and standing here among the dinamations makes that apparent.  We like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, but that is too self-congratulating.  Extremity of evolution is perhaps more accurate. We are off to the side.  Way off.  All the two-legged dinosaurs had a tail….  In fact, all other bipeds had or have tails.  We are the only ones that don’t; in fact, our first act as a lineage was to dispose of our tails.  That means we must have had extremely powerful brains from the start.  Standing fully upright is like balancing a pencil on its point, and it can be accomplished only by using an extremely sophisticated computer which integrates balance and muscular coordination. 

What tail-balanced biped has a program so sophisticated that it can breakdance, ice skate, walk the high wire and the balance beam, sprint for a bus, lug out the trash, or kick an opponent in the shins? The human brain is a clever replacement for the tail.  If you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, the human brain is just a different kind of gigantism.  If you could take our minds—the sum of our feelings, thoughts, impulses—and cast them in physical form, you would gaze upon a collection of sizes and shapes that would make the dinosaurs positively boring. 

Einsteins, Ted Bundys, Newtons, Hitlers, Mozarts, Shakespeares, popes, and saints—the range exceeds comprehension.  It’s sobering to think that gigantism goeth before a fall. 

The time has come to exit the building.  The light flick off, and the saurian robots hulk in the darkness.  Or maybe it is not darkness, but the past.  They have been dead these past 70,001,990 years—ever since the Cretaceous period ended at 2:12 P.M. on March 2, seventy million B.C.  I  give the “exact time” to illustrate how ludicrously short and preposterously self-centered our human concept of time is. When you deal with environmental impact and ecological change, you must think in earth time—the rate at which the planet ages and changes naturally. To put us in perspective, let us go forward seventy million years and see what the fossil record has to say about Homo sapiens.

Straightaway we run into a curious problem:  the smallest increment the fossil record can resolves is about one hundred thousand years; anything that happens closer together than one hundred thousand years can’t be separated.  This means we would be hard-pressed to tell from the fossil record whether Christ came before or after the computer—or even, for that matter, whether he came before Neanderthal man, or whether Neanderthal man came after the nuclear age, which would make a lot of sense. 

The point is, human civilization has arisen so fast in comparison to the rhythms of the natural world that it cannot be measured in geological time.  It is like a subatomic flash.  An alien race arriving in seventy million years would conclude that we had arrived instantly, perhaps from another planet.  The critical question is,  HOW DO YOU CONTROL A FLASH?  A greenhouse effect caused in the last hundred years; a hole in the ozone layer in the past thirty years; three billion people added to the population since 1950—the rapidity of these trends is out of all proportion with the ecological/geological change, and we are currently engaged in one of the planet’ greatest and fastest extinctions.  It will be indistinguishable from the impact of an asteroid.  We are, in other words, the instruments of extinction. -------William Jordan, Divorce Among the Gulls: An Uncommon Look at Human Nature (1991)

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