When humans are over

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Many marvel at my magnanimity, as well as my alliteration. I set up my blog to promote my own writings, yet from time to time I use it to draw attention to the work of my competitors. Today I’m doing it again.

“When humans are over, and have become just another geological stratum, the entirety of our existence will be represented by a layer no thicker than a cigarette paper. Now I find that rather beautifully humbling.”

That is the closing passage of an article in the Guardian Weekly by Philip Hoare (pictured) whose works include Leviathan and The Sea Inside.

These words resonated with me so strongly that I clipped them out immediately. It is exactly this sense of the fragility of our species, combined with its uniqueness, that inspired me to write The Eeks Trilogy.

“What ‘uniqueness’?!” you may protest. “We share Earth with millions of other species that feed, grow, reproduce and die just as we do, and throughout the universe there may be billions more!”

“Aah,” I reply, “but we have yet to meet, or find the skinniest of evidence of, another species with anything approaching our capacity for abstract thought, for curiosity, for imagination or for reasoning. How many dolphins have figured out the Laws of Motion? How many daffodils have made it to the moon?”

If we are unique, if ours are the only minds that have even asked the fundamental questions, we really should take better care of ourselves.

One thought on “When humans are over

  1. For some reason you’ve aroused my own stroppiness concerning what I see as the extreme stupidity of some of Mankind’s greatest minds– and one in particular, Hawkings. His latest scaremongering is that Mothership Earth will become uninhabitable and blames it on Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement.

    But this just a corollary to his persistent calls to inhabit other worlds. Well, the nearest star (other than the Sun) is 4 light years away. The nearest planet of interest might be how far? So lets send someone to look and come back (alive) to tell us what might make life work there. Ok, ok, he really means move to Mars. So where does the idiotic notion come from that we can adapt to life on Mars but not on Earth?

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