Beyond Armageddon

Masai Mara National Reserve

"Some say the end is near, some say we'll see Armageddon soon; I certainly hope we will", Sings Maynard in one of my favorite Tool songs.

We wont ! No one said it will be so fast that one human life time would cover it. If anything, things at Nature's level work at a time scale much beyond our little time on the planet. In geological terms, a short period covers thousands to millions of years. Our planet has seen five major extinction events. The last one happened when an asteroid hit us and was the fastest, given the external influence. It lasted between one and 2.5 million years. The closest we came to extinction was during the younger dryas, that caused the great flood and wiped off mammoths and 50 % of humans. That lasted 1000 years. So, Id advise against keeping the popcorn handy.

Now, some argue that the wheels were set in motion when we started farming and this will be the first extinction brought on by the over population and resource drain by one species. But then, wasn't multiplication and growth in the source code of every species? That said, others may argue that extinction itself is a natural process brought forth by nature herself. It's happened numerous times too after all.

What we know for a fact is that non marine life is going extinct much faster than new non marine life is coming to life. What we also know for a fact is that the planet and her Nature work on causality and if one thing leads to another, so be it, at it's own time and not by any human clock.

What's certain is this, that if things get to a point that most species disappear, humans cannot sustain the balance necessary for their own survival by themselves yet and neither do they seem to be making any efforts to take on the job by themselves.

What we are doing is limited so called conservation. Maybe that's not enough. Maybe there's already too many of us. Maybe we oughta realize that we can't airlift everyone off the planet in a million years time even if we have the tech for it.

Just maybe, we should play a bigger role in holding this environment together actively by taking on new responsibilities. Maybe those bots and drones we're building need to get to work helping the birds and bees out . Easier said than done, I guess.