If it were not for the Chicxulub meteor some 65 million years ago, life on earth might be very different today. Without this dinosaur extinction event, there likely wouldn’t have been room for mammals to evolve into modern humans.
But, unlike the dinosaurs, we humans are here for a good time, not a long time.
So how long were the dinosaurs here on earth? Well, they hung around for 165 million years, and went extinct about 65 million years ago.
And humans? Well, 6 Million years ago, a group of primates started walking upright and this is considered to be the beginning of the human lineage (yet, they were far from looking anything like modern humans). Modern humans have only been here for 200,000 years and our civilization, about 6000 years.
Imagine if we had the same amount of time allotted to the dinosaurs? What would happen in the next 160 million years? It’s almost unfathomable considering the amount of damage we have caused in our relatively short time here. I’d be surprised if we were still around in 1000 years, let alone 160 million years.
Something changed when we came on the scene. How did we manage to evolve into thinking, sentient beings so quickly? If you look at how long the dinosaurs were here, our time on this planet is a drop in the bucket. Yet, we managed to build a modern civilization that completely took over and is constantly changing at an exponential rate from one generation to the next.
In the case of the dinosaurs, they had hundreds of millions of years, yet not much really changed from one millennium to the next. Sure, evolution happened over millions of years, but other than that, animals pretty much lived and died the same way their ancestors did.
For us, I’m certain that our accelerating need to change and improve is going to be our downfall. In our never ending quest for a “better life,” we are going against nature at every turn with our insatiable greed. The planet can’t handle this level of consumption.
To be fair, for most of our time here, we have co-existed with nature in a harmonious way just like every other animal on the planet. It’s just in the last few centuries that we morphed into something the world has never experienced.
Are we too smart for our own good? Who knows?
One thing I can say is that, though we are intelligent and sentient, we are far from smart. If we were, we’d see the writing on the wall and slow down. But that isn’t going to happen – it just isn’t in our nature. As a result, we may be the most disruptive, short lived species to ever dominate the earth.
Species come and go and we are no different – even with our big brains. Nature will take care of the planet and we’ll be a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things. The earth has recovered from many cataclysmic disasters over billions of years and is ready to handle whatever happens. Nuclear war, climate disasters, environmental catastrophes, resulting in mass extinctions is not the end of life on earth. Life has come very close to being extinguished in the past and it’s always recovered.
I have faith in nature and the planet, not so much for us.
