Future humans may one day ask, "What really happened in the early 21st century?"
We will not be around to answer this question. We'll have dodged it nicely. Instead, future humans will have to deal with our shit all by themselves. Right now, according to UN estimates, the population in 2050 will be pushing 9.2 billion. Crowded onto a finite planet, these future humans will be knee deep in our discarded plastic water bottles. Peak Oil, Peak Water and resource wars for these will be our legacy.
What a short stint humans have had on this planet.
The dinosaurs existed here successfully for 160 million years. They were so successful that it took a deus ex machina to end their reign. No natural or evolutionary process could dislodge their dominance so a meteor had to come from space to do it for them. Minus that impact, they'd still be here, dumbly munching vegetation and eachother.
In evolutionary terms they are the most successful lifeform ever to inhabit this planet, having managed an uninterrupted 160 million year span. Us hominids, on the other hand, have managed a paltry 3 million years (that is if you include our hairy but upright ancestors). Agriculture and civilisation itself are a mere eight thousand year anomaly tacked on to the end of millennia of hunter gathering.
Dinosaurs themselves have a very specific legacy for us.
Legacy exists in the minds of those of us who come 'later'. One's legacy is something discovered by others after you are gone. Those who dig through the soil using sentience and intelligence are the ones who decipher what legacy shall be. Our paleontology has constructed the legacy of the dinosaurs; large lizards with tiny brains that walked the earth for aeons yet never discovered the wonder of fire, tools or toilet paper. Dumb leviathans, shambling across the earth, terrifying but as thick as planks. For humans, the dinosaur legacy is that of cold blooded terrible lizards, too dumb to alter their fate and who got wiped out by nature because they were around for too long and were becoming a bit of a pain. Nature needed a reboot.
So the question of Hilaritus Universalis is...
What shall our human legacy be? What shall our fossil record be?
Obviously, addressing the question presumes our extinction. But so be it. Let's toy with that for a moment while we grab the popcorn from the microwave. We're talking legacy here and since nothing lasts forever anyway, it's safe to presume humans will one day be gone and some future inhabitants of this planet will dig up our fossil remains and try to peace together where we went wrong, much like we do to dinosaurs.
Homo Sapiens.
"An interesting species of bipedal primates that evolved from other hominids and became the dominant species on earth for 200,000 years. They expanded rapidly aided by their ability to develop intimate social groups. They were cunning hunters who worked in packs and soon lost the hair from their bodies over time by clothing themselves with the dead skins of their prey. They later developed fire. They then expanded rapidly from a single continent and colonized the entire planet except Antartica."
Toward the end of this expansion, in the last 5% of their time on the planet, they discovered agriculture and settled in permanent locations. This gave rise to an explosive growth in their numbers. Abundant food led to task specialization which in turn furthered discovery. Their large brains, progressively larger over time finally found a purpose for all that grey matter: science and civilization.
From a roaming population of 1 million humans in 10,000 BCE to 200 million in 1 AD to 1 billion in 1800 to 6.7 billion in 2009, humans expanded rapidly, dominating all ecosystems, displacing all other species leading to mass extinctions. Prey animals were the first to go such as the mammoth in 10,000 BCE and, as the human population expanded, the extinctions began to include fellow top tier predators like the wolf, tiger, and bear.
However the lack of prey was not the cause of human extinction. The legacy of humans, for those who might come later and will one day dig up the fossil remains, was written in humanity's own insatiable nature. Resource abundance encouraged a bloom in their numbers. They dominated. They sucked the planet dry. They took all there was to take. They invented a God in their own image so that they could make him responsible for their actions instead of themselves whenever selfish action conflicted obviously with their individual morality. They went to war with their own kind, made the planet uninhabitable and died out because they were incapable of collective action on behalf of themselves. They inherited too much of the lizard brain of their dinosaur ancestors perhaps. Having reached total dominance of all the territory that was, the only enemy left was themselves. So they divided up the land and gave each region a name. And those of one region would kill to prove their pocket of earth was better than the 'other's' region.
Meanwhile, the earth burned.
Humanity's legacy may prove its worth in infinite time by serving as an example to those other species who will come later. When these future beings dig up the fossils of human civilisation and piece together the story of its rise and fall, humanity will serve as a warning beacon to all those with intelligence of what not to do.
Just the way dinosaurs today to humans are dumb scary lizards who outlived their usefulness, we humans will someday, to another species, be the 'intelligent selfish hominids' that proved the limits of the usefulness of 'intelligence' and who overran the planet and destroyed themselves by greed and avarice. Human legacy on earth shall be the lesson that intelligence is useless unless it is tempered by empathy and care.
It is terrifying that, despite all human artistic and scientific achievement, human legacy may one day be only a warning to future lifeforms of 'the road that should not be taken', that void into which the humans fell, and all we shall be is a learning tool to point out to distant inhabitants of this rock the very course of action any would-be intelligent species must avoid.
Grab the popcorn fellow travelers, let's take a ride and watch the decline and fall of us.
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