They Started to Think
We are all side-effects of the world. It didn’t want to create us, Earth didn’t just decided it wants life, or more specifically it wants humans, and made us.
It just so happens that the Earth is at the right distance from the sun, water happens to be liquid in these conditions, and life just happens to blossom on Earth.
No one decided anything that should happen, stuff just happened and humans came to existence. Being a by-product of the world, we are a living thing gone wrong. Suddenly, these homo sapiens aren’t just going around plucking berries and hunting animals to eat — suddenly, they started to think.
Suddenly, they decide that they should plant seeds in an orderly fashion in the ground and harvest them to eat when they are ready. They started taking milk from other animals to drink, to make weird lumps of milk that can be stored called cheese. They started to take animals and not kill them but keep them for themselves.
They started to babble, so they can communicate. Grunts aren’t going to work, they need to start having a standardized sounds they call speech. But sounds are just sounds, they appear and then they’re gone, humans need something that can last through the ages and record things down. They started scraping rocks and walls.
Walls. They started to erect places for them to stay in, some places they use stone, some places they use sticks, some places they use mud and clay, some places used a bit of everything.
Soon, they wanted more. More land, more people, more power. They began taking over places where other people live. They crafted sharp objects used to drain liquid out of another’s body — in which he goes to sleep, and never wakes.
Land wasn’t enough, they took to the seas. They used their ingenuity to make more sharp objects, together with things that go BANG! All these power, all these resources, all the things they could do with them!
They started to fight a lot more with one another. Everyone wants something, and they kill to get it. They bathed the Earth with blood before the realized this need not be the case.
They finally stopped.
They began to think again, making the world better for them — cars, trains, planes, satellites, space shuttles — they left Earth for the first time!
They brought the world together from every corner and every crevice, they shared their stories and stories of others with a thing called internet — the greatest thing humans have ever created.
They decided to sit down and write an article about it on Medium.
So, they started to think.
Humans on Earth
Humans are in this world for quite a while now. Well, if the entire of Earth’s history is a 24 hour clock, when 12am was the formation of the Earth, humans would only have arrived at 11:58:43pm.
This means out of 24 hours, humans were only here for a little over a minute on Earth, but look at us, dominating Earth like no other living thing has ever did. Every where we look, we can see footprints left by us humans — buildings, roads, pollution, cars, ships, ready-to-eat food. We fundamentally changed life on Earth with our presence, all within the time span of brushing your teeth.
All these miracles we can manage, are because we exist(duh), and all this just because this huge piece of rock we live on have just the ideal conditions. But slowly we are ebbing away our resources, we are driving ourselves into extinction.
In the end, Earth gave us life, and when the time comes, it is going to take us back. When the last human dies and when the Anthropocene epoch is over, Earth will conquer what was hers again — her lands, her seas, her skies.
Be good to it, it doesn’t owe us anything, in fact, we owe her a lot more.
Thanks for reading! This started out as a piece about how small humans are, then halfway I realized as small as we are, we had great impacts on Earth unlike any other; It was such a roller coaster of emotions writing this. Anyway, if you enjoyed it, give it a ❤!
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