Plague

I just finished Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ and heartily advise it to everybody. The book is concerned with the history or science and gives a good, concise description of most of the scientific achievements and discoveries up to 2003 (which was the year the book was published).

Of course, that means there is a large gap of four years that it doesn’t cover, but nonetheless it’s well worth the time and effort. The thing is, it wasn’t actually an effort. Bill Bryson has a gift for writing and manages to entertain and excite with facts that in almost any normal academic’s hands would most certainly bore. Of course, I’ve already talked about the need for academics to write and speak more clearly a few entries ago, so I won’t get into it here.

Of all the chapters, the one that really got to me was the last one, in which he talks about the immense amount of damage that we’re doing to our planet, in terms of the number of species that we’re driving to extinction, both in terms of flora and fauna.

He points out that before we came along with our destructive ways there was basically an extinction every four years, or so. Now that number is 120,000 times as high.

If we’re the chosen people than why do we choose to destroy?

I still remember that scene from Matrix oh so well, where Mr. Smith is talking with Morpheus and tells Morpheus that humanity isn’t a normal organism, but a plague, a disease. That thought never left me, because it seems to ring so true. Our intelligence has given us a disproportionate ability to affect our surroundings. Though in terms of bio mass we make up a tiny percentage, in terms of our ability to use and abuse there is nothing comparable.

And every species we drive to extinction makes our world’s ecosystem that bit weaker, as there is just that little bit less biodiversity to survive the next cataclysm when (not if) it happens. Heck, maybe we’re even the next cataclysm.

Of course, our world will survive. It has survived this way, with life on it, for billions of years. We’re just a small statistical anomaly that is very actively trying to correct itself. I just believe that we have so much more potential then we’re currently displaying. We always have these alien races that we depict in our movies and series, which are backwards and warlike, but it seems to me that if any alien species were to stumble across us they would directly hit reverse and clear out.

It seems to me that we’re the violent ones, we just don’t know any better because we have nothing to compare ourselves to. Of course we do have something to compare ourselves to, namely our ideals. It would just be nice if those ideals would have just a bit more preservation and a little less desecration.

But then preservation doesn’t really seem to fit in our model of survival of the fittest.