JUNE 14, 2022 – (Cont.) The alien’s filaments blinked—at an evenly pace, as if signaling patience while I assembled a response to the “why” of our myopia. Hadn’t I explained myself clearly enough? Dopamine plus a limited life span. Simple enough. But what about the original question of this phase—the notion of our “worst bad stuff”?
“You’re just gonna have to adjust to the idea,” I started up again, “that we humans are myopic by nature and nurture.”
“Okay,” said the alien. “Based on what you’ve said thus far, I can kinda understand how myopia can be an undesirable trait, but why do you say it’s your worst bad stuff?”
“I could cite many examples of where myopia leads, but the worst of those places is pretty much worse than everything else combined.”
The alien’s filaments blinked erratically. “You’ve . . . got my attention,” it said cautiously. “What gives?”
“What gives, as it that thanks to our myopia, we’re well on our way to disrupting life on this planet in the most serious and destructive way since our kind first appeared.”
“If I may ask,” said the alien, “when did you appear and where?”
The question gave me whiplash. I was going down the path of climate change when out of nowhere, the alien veers off into evolution, however unwittingly. Rather than resist, I decided to keep driving but go for the earliest possible U-turn.
“Well, we didn’t just ‘appear’ here out of thin air. Not like you did. We evolved slowly from simian forebears, until one day we were noticeably less hairy and arguably more attractive than simple apes. Anthropogenists date that day back between 1.4 million and 2.4 million years ago, but again, that kind of time horizon probably doesn’t make much sense to you. It doesn’t make much sense to me, either, since by nature, I’ve got a big case of myopia. So you can grasp the time concept a little better, think of it this way: when the current light of the Andromeda Galaxy—the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way—started out across space toward earth is about when my original ancestors dropped down out of the trees. Many wound up living in caves, and after a few hundred millennia of that life-style, they explored their environments, learned to alter them, and changed the face of the earth.
“No one thought much about changing the face of the earth part. For thousands of generations, the earth and its resources seemed infinite. Fish were to fished. Buffalo were to be shot—first for their meat and hides but eventually for the sport of it. Passenger pigeons flew by the billions, until men with shotguns killed every last one of them. Minerals from iron to copper, gold to silver, bauxite to beryllium, coal to cobalt, were mined until the earth and many a human soul was ravaged. And worst of all, in many places we chopped down all the trees. In a place called Lebanon, for example, once famous for its beautiful cedars, the only survivor is the one you now see on the Lebanese flag—the proud work of us as homo ironicus. (Cont.)
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
