Perspective
The purest of science fiction. The Earth, in a post-human future, many millions of years hence, being re-explored. By . . . whom? Perhaps extraterrestrial explorers or colonists, just as we now peer at images of rock strata sent back by the Mars landers. Or perhaps a new, home-grown intelligence: say, a newly evolved species of hyper-intelligent rodent. No matter. What would such explorers, of whatever ancestry, find of our own, long-vanished, human empire? A frivolous question, perhaps. But perhaps not. It is hard, as humans, to get a proper perspective on the human race. We know that the Earth has a history that is long beyond human imagination, and that our own history is tiny by comparison. We know that we are animals, and yet we have transcended our natural environment to live in surroundings that, mostly, we have manufactured for ourselves. We know that this created environment is evolving at a speed that is vastly more rapid than the normal evolution of biological organisms or communities. We do not understand, quite, how our created environment and our activities interact with the natural environment, and we do not know what the long-term consequences will be. Let us take one view. We are simply one species out of perhaps 30 million currently inhabiting the planet (reputable estimates range from some 5 million to over 100 million). We are briefly in the golden age of our power, our dominance. But we are destined to extinction also, just as the dinosaurs became extinct. The world will then go on as before. Once a geological age or two has passed, there will be nothing but the odd bone or gold ring to show that we were ever here. In this scenario, comparison with the dinosaurs is apt. They were the top predators of their day, as our single species is now. But consider, also, the differences between us and the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs existed on this Earth for about a hundred million years, and included many species adapted to different environments. Homo sapiens is but one species, and has been around for less than a quarter of a million years, less than a tenth of an average species’ longevity.