Will Earthlings Survive the Earth – Or Vice Versa?

What’s scarier than severe recession? Okay, depression. Terrorism looms still, but for sheer panic, nothing matches 90% species die-off. Not from asteroids, nor nukes, nor is our planet doomed, though the approaching Andromeda galaxy looks to digest our Milky Way – but not for billions of years. Let’s worry instead about our progeny and how they sustain humanity if James Lovelock is right. He foresees shrunken habitat, resource wars, scorched landscapes, and gruesome casualties.

Erratic populations are hardly novel: 99% of earth’s emergent life forms have gone extinct. The demise of dinosaurs, awarding an obscure, half-pint mammal a leg up, dramatizes extinction – and yet a billion birds came forth. Our species is special in this regard: we hog 40% of global energy, but nothing (but the Rapture, a variant end of time fable) overrules physics, chemistry, and biology – or willful blindness towards overpopulation, pollution, and rising oceans.

Scads more of us jeopardize all, as oxygen-breathing, carbon-dioxide exhalers burn down life-forests that freely redeem oxygen from carbon dioxide. If we “grow, baby, grow” then we must “build, baby, build” and “drill, baby, drill” beyond sustainable practices. Actually, anointing ourselves “earthlings” doesn’t change our newcomer status: our million year genealogy pales next to a planet pushing 15 billion years. Lowly snapping turtles are 200 times older. On a 24 hour clock tracking 15 billion years, homo sapiens span 10 seconds. And may not make 15.

Smirking Chimp