In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has widely been regarded as a bad move.
-Douglas Adams
I would submit that number two in the List of Great Cosmic Oops would be the design and manufacture of that two-legged hominid species, Homo Sapiens. About fifteen billion years after the aforementioned Beginning, on a backwater planet towards the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, apes crawled out of trees, shook hands and began trying to sell each other life insurance and scented doilies.
In the great scheme of things, we’ve been around for a cosmic eyeblink. Evolutionarily successful species like the shark are just now waking up to the fact that not only are we here, but that we taste pretty yummy as well. We’re like the new item on the menu that everyone’s talking about.
But in the short time we’ve been here, we’ve come up with so many ways to be not only completely useless, but harmful as well, that if there were a galactic record book for that sort of thing, we’d almost certainly be in it.
Greatest number of ways to kill each other - Homo Sapiens
Most unique ways of killing each other - Homo Sapiens
Greatest number of ways of abusing each other - Homo Sapiens
Largest variety of ways to torture other living things before chopping them up and making them into soup - Homo Sapiens
I watch the news every morning, and perhaps I shouldn’t, because my already-pessimistic nature is becoming downright anti-human. I have many days when I truly believe that we should just be wiped off of the planet and let the next species step up and see if they can do any better. In fact, those days far outnumber the days when I have any amount of faith in humanity at all. It’s pointless to list any of the news stories - just take a look on CNN at any given time and the stories of murder and abuse and kidnapping and war and terror and on and on and on just fill the page.
I’m not sure why we’re here, either individually or collectively. Perhaps (and I am really starting to believe this) we are an evolutionary mistake. Nature’s “Take Two” (Take One being the dinosaurs.) Once we screw up our lines enough, maybe the Great Director (whoever or whatever that may be) will yell “Cut! Get these idiots off the set!” and our understudies, the squid, will step up and start out with “I think, therefore I am.” Then the elephants and the whales will go off and bitch about how they didn’t get chosen again.
It’s kind of a shame, really. I’d kind of like to see what kind of roller coasters the squid come up with.
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