Why on earth do we think the Earth is ours?
We talk endlessly about saving the planet, as if it’s some fragile thing we own. It isn’t ours. It never was. We just happen to be here at the moment. And it is just a moment.
The Earth has been spinning away for about four and a half billion years. We, as a species, have been around for roughly 300,000 of those. That’s 0.0067% of the planet’s lifetime. In other words, we’ve barely even started the clock.
And yet, we strut around as though we’re the landlords of the place, when really we’re short-term tenants. Temporary lodgers. We’re painting the walls, rearranging the furniture, and burning through the utilities like there’s no deposit to lose.
Don’t get me wrong, I am the most positive and optimistic person you will meet. I genuinely am. But if you step right back and look at this objectively, you have to agree that we’re getting it kind of wrong.
The arrogance of humans is astonishing when you really think about it. We believe the planet depends on us. That we can somehow save it. We can’t. If we destroy the environment, we don’t destroy the Earth, we destroy ourselves. The Earth has survived asteroid strikes, ice ages, mass extinctions, and 165 million years of dinosaurs trampling around the flower beds. It’ll survive us too. We’re the problem, not the planet.
And it’s not even subtle. In just a few centuries, we’ve gone from discovering fire to building weapons that could wipe out entire cities. A few keystrokes, one political tantrum, and entire nations could vanish. As I type this, there are half a dozen crazy, unhinged, unstable blokes with the power to do all of this, and we can’t do a thing about it. I will state clearly again for the record that I am an optimist, but the reality is you and I can only go about our day. We can’t change the greed, ego, and power traits of a few twats.
If you go back far enough, the worst a human could do was club someone over the head. Now we (he) can annihilate millions from behind a desk. Progress, apparently. And I do state ‘he’ because it is always men, sorry ladies. We’re not all like that.
I’ve come to believe that our days as a species are numbered. Not in a dramatic, “the asteroid’s coming” kind of way, but more in a “we’ve outsmarted ourselves” kind of way.
Let’s put this into context. The dinosaurs arrived around 230 million years ago and lasted for roughly 160 million. That’s a long stint. They didn’t invent the internet, they didn’t split the atom, and they didn’t build an artificial intelligence capable of outthinking them. They didn’t even build straight roads! The Romans did that one. They just got on with being dinosaurs until something big fell out of the sky and hit them on the head.
We’ve been here a mere 300,000 years, and already we’ve created a form of intelligence that could quite easily write us out of the story altogether. I actually believe AI could be a good thing… if we harness it properly. Big if. The problem is, there are enough toxic, power-hungry humans (men) to guarantee we’ll find the wrong way to use it.
And that’s what makes me think we won’t be here for the long haul. I’d give us, at best, another thousand years. That’s not a prediction, just a hunch. I’ve got no data, no graphs, no peer-reviewed papers to back it up. Just a gut feeling based on the trajectory we’re on.
We’ve become experts at developing tools faster than we develop wisdom. The gap between our technological power and our emotional maturity is staggering. And that gap keeps widening. We’re clever enough to create things that make us gods, but not calm or humble enough to handle that responsibility.
Here’s the thing though: the Earth doesn’t care. It’s not angry. It’s not sad. It’s not waiting for us to redeem ourselves. It’ll just carry on. The seas will rise and fall. Mountains will crumble. Forests will return. Eventually, all traces of us will disappear, and the planet will do what it’s always done. Adapt.
That’s the part that fascinates me. We talk about “saving the planet” as if the planet’s sitting here in peril, begging for our help. It isn’t. It’s watching us self-destruct and thinking, “I’ve seen this film before.”
We’re just another chapter in a four-and-a-half-billion-year story. The dinosaurs got 160 million years. We might scrape a million if we’re lucky, but I doubt we’ll even make half that. Because we’ve built the means to delete ourselves, and we’re arrogant enough to think we won’t press the button.
It’s not necessarily tragic though. It’s just evolution doing what it does. Nature’s edit button. Species appear, they thrive, they dominate, and eventually, they’re replaced. We just happen to be the first to consciously engineer our own downfall. It’s no big deal. We are all just tiny specks of humanity amongst billions of specks of humanity existing in the minutest fraction of time. We are made of the same stuff as the universe; the same elements. We came from it, and we will go back to it.
Maybe one day, something else will evolve, something with a bit more sense. And maybe it’ll dig up our fossil record, look at our skyscrapers, our satellites, our digital ghosts, and say, “Crikey, these humans really did themselves in, didn’t they?” And it’ll be right.
But until then, I’ll keep enjoying my coffee, eating as well as I can, exercising as much as I can, being nice to people, running my business, spending time with my friends and family, enjoying the simple things in life, and hoping we prove myself wrong. Which we won’t.