It’s the end of an era!

I went to a very interesting lecture a couple of weeks ago that was the keynote speech of a colloquium that was right up my alley. It was called "Apocalypse and Transformation," and was essentially a discussion and analysis of books about the apocalypse. Sadly, the keynote speech was the only event that I was able to make in a week-long colloquium (stupid job), but I am grateful that I at least was able to attend that.

One of the most interesting points that was touched on was a fairly trendy term that’s used today: Anthropocene. This term is used by some scientists to describe the current geological epoch that we are living in. (Officially we’re in the Holocene, but maybe that will “officially” change sometime soon.) Basically the term Anthropocene was coined because human impact is so great that we are changing the face of the earth dramatically. Greenhouse effect and global warming aside, it was also mentioned that our presence is causing mass extinction on our planet on the level of the KT extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

I’d love to go into more detail on this, but honestly most of the info I have is from Wikipedia, so if you’re interested, just click on the links above. The main point I have to make about this—besides blowing your mind— is that the human species has the same effect as a giant meteor crashing into the planet. When it happened 65 million years ago, dinosaurs went extinct and mammals became the new “power” on the planet. When our work as Species Destroyers is done, some scientists predict that we’ll have wiped out 50% of extant species, but I honestly think it’ll be more. I think that we’ll be the last species that we wipe out, since we’ll have changed our planet so dramatically that it will be unsustainable to us. I wonder what the next dominant species will be? Insects? Fish? Something completely new? Hopefully not something as destructive as we are.

I’m not trying to get too deep, since this is only a blog after all, but if you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient higher power, who knows exactly what's going to happen in the future, then what does that mean that they purposefully put our destructive species in this world? I can’t help but think of the line in The Matrix where the AI Agent Smith tells Morpheus that the human race is a virus that kills everyone else. Maybe that’s been our purpose from the start.

I have trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that I was created to be a harbinger of death. Most of the time I tell myself that it’s just my vivid and paranoid imagination running away with me. But every so often, I believe.