With "EARTH DAY" approaching and all the heat about Global Warming, I am reminded of the prologue I wrote for a "blast from the past" sci-fi story I have been working on for more years than I care to admit. In any event, as one take on the Global Warming controversy, here is the prologue to my Novella in progress, "Getting A Head.":
The future is the past...
Save the earth! Save the earth! Everyone is screaming save the earth. But the earth doesn't need saving. Face it; the earth is not going anywhere. How old is the earth? A billion years? Billions of years? Or, as the late Dr. Carl Sagan would have said, "billions and billions" of years? The earth does not need saving. The earth is a survivor. It survived the dinosaurs. It survived the ice age. It Survived the Romans, the Inquisition... Survived volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, the holocaust, Hiroshima... Hell, the earth even survived the sixties!
The notion that man is capable of destroying the earth is absurd. Man's entire existence, from the first cave person (or Adam and Eve, if you prefer) to today is barely a moment, barely a blink, a single breath in the lifetime of the earth. To think that we, human beings, are strong enough or significant enough to wipe out that which has survived, even thrived, for so long without us harkens back to the days when astronomers believed that man was the center of the universe. Well, we are not the center of the universe. We never were and we never will be.
The so-called "environmentalists" have it all wrong. Their passionate cries should not be to "save the earth", but rather, to "save the people!" or "save the humans!" for we are the ones at risk. In truth, there should be no "environmentalists." Instead, there should be "humanists," dedicated to the preservation of the human race. The pollution, waste, crime, hate, carcinogens, terrorism and civil unrest that plague our modern lives do not put us on a course that will destroy the planet. They do put us on the path to imminent self-destruction. The earth needs no savior. The earth will be here long after every trace of man's very existence is gone...
For all we know, it has happened before (history is doomed to repeat itself, is it not?) For all we know, our species of Homo sapiens is not the first to inhabit this planet we call Earth... Perhaps we are not the first examples of intelligent life, but rather, the second, or even third attempt. Perhaps we are only one of many creatures who, like the Jurassic aged dinosaurs before us, inhabited this planet, thrived upon it, and then faced extinction.
Perhaps...
