Welcome …
Welcome to planet Earth home to some 6.5 billion human beings. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of plants and animals that make up the estimated 100 million species that we share the planet with. The fact that life exists at all on Earth is the due to the conjunction of so many fortuitous and unlikely circumstances it truely warrants the description miraculous.
It’s not often that we see her from this point of view. We spend most of our lives with our noses pressed so close up against our personal issues that we rarely glimpse the bigger picture. Try holding your hand 2 inches in front of your face and notice what you can see. Now move your hand to arms length and notice the difference in your field of vision. This lack of perspective leads us to some very strange behaviour.
So here’s a few facts to help us get some perspective on things.
We are clinging to a ball of rock due to a force we do not yet comprehend that we call gravity.This ball of rock is whizzing through space at a staggering speed of 487,353 mph and is spinning so fast that if you could jump up in the air and not move with the planets rotation you would see the ground zoom past at about 1000 mph. We are travelleing through an infinite universe that is, as far as we know devoid of other life.
Geologists and Physicists tell us that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that life began about 3.9 billion years ago. Homo sapiens have been here for about 50,000 years. To try to get an image of how insignificantly small this is, imagine if one day (24 hours) represents the time the earth has existed. Out of that 1 day of existence, man has been here for the last 0.96 seconds.
Whilst Homo sapiens may currently constitute the cutting edge of the evolutionary process, it’s a process that never stands still. Time and again evolution has demonstrated that it is prepared to erase millions of years of work, go back to the drawing board and start again. It has done so already on a monumental scale during at least 6 major extinction events. Some scientist believe we are currently living through the 7th extinction event right now, with 70% of all species set to disappear before the end of the century due to mans impact on the environment.
The dinosaurs once laid claim to pole position as the dominant life form. They remained the cutting edge of the evolutionary process for about 185 million years and have descendants with us still today. However, when they were wiped out, evolution didn’t skip a beat. It immediately set to work on their replacement and we were the eventual product. If 185 million years lost isn’t a problem for evolution, what kind of a loss does 50,000 years represent to a process operating on this time scale.
There’s a lot of misguided talk about saving the planet but lets get this into perspective too. The Earth is in no danger whatsoever from us. She managed just fine without Homo sapiens for 99.99% of her existence and will no doubt do just fine without us for the remaining 5 billion years it’s estimated our solar system will last until the sun becomes a red dwarf and turns the Earth to dust once more. Scientists estimate it will take just 1000 years for all traces of modern man to be totally eradicated from the Earth after our extinction.
Unless we get a proper sense of perspective on things and make some profound change about how we approach life on earth fairly rapidly, by 2050, evolution may already be working on the next dominant species.
