Food For Thought 16

In the beginning there was… well, I don’t know what there was. But then there was a tremendous explosion. Then, for a few hundred million years, there was nothing of much interest. After that, stars and galaxies began to form, and they were fascinating and beautiful, but nobody was there to notice. Billions and billions of years went by, until a molecular cloud happened to collapse, inadvertently giving us the Sun, moon, asteroids, etc. Our humble planet Earth formed by accident, and for billions more years it was wet and gassy, with little to recommend it save some bacteria here and there. Then plants emerged, then all of a sudden there were animals—weird ones—and they lived and they died and they evolved steadily into dinosaurs, who met an unfortunate fate, then very recently we showed up, looking something of a mess, and our ancestors struggled to stay alive, and they fashioned tools and they built little dwellings and they made do and then died, and then the next batch did the same, and they learned to farm, and they learned to build, and slowly something quite impressive emerged. (They were also often killed or enslaved, or did the killing and enslaving.) They built civilizations and they discovered math and they gave birth to Socrates and then they murdered Socrates for asking too many questions. And they fumbled along and tried to figure things out, and they mostly failed, but they learned how to fill their bellies and minds, and they discovered their incredible potential, building printing presses and cotton gins and hundred-story buildings and gigantic ships that sometimes sank. Together, based on what those before them had learned, they invented steam trains and then pickup trucks and then jet airplanes and then television game shows and then internet pornography and then six different kinds of poop emoji pool float. And all through the process people fell in love, and were torn apart, and worked their asses off, and watched their children screw up or do well, and went on adventures, and played with Legos, and built too many cars and clogged the roads but refused to carpool so they got stuck in traffic and it served them right, and did monstrously cruel things, and tamed a lot of diseases, and ate a lot of tacos, and petted a lot of animals, and treated the planet in highly irresponsible and ungrateful ways, and just generally acted out a stunningly violent, heartwarming, infuriating, inspiring collective drama on an inconceivable scale. (More here)