End of the Continent

The Pacific Ocean certainly is humbling. After hacking my way through the Washington rainforest, I stood on the water's edge looking into an infinate stretch of water and fog. The tanker ships floated lost on a horizon of seemingly endless and empty field of tossing water. I stand here at the edge of land and think about how random that it is that I am here today.

Our planet, our "spaceship Earth," as Ssack would call it, is the one inhabitable chunk of iron in our Milky Way galaxy (at least to the extent of our collective human knowledge). The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across while the diameter of the Earth is a mere 12,740 kilometers. This planet accounts for far less than 1% of the "stuff" (gases, rocks, other planets) in our immediate galaxy, much less the entire universe.

Now bring it down it even closer to home. The surface area of Earth is about 510,065,600 kilometers squared, and 70% of that surface is covered by water. That leaves about 153,019,680 square kilometers for us humans and the land animals we share it with. Even still a huge amount of that land mass cannot be inhabited by our species effectively.

I turn around and look back at the continent that is nearly 10,000 kilometers across (keep in mind that I can really only see about 20 meters of thick underbrush)and think about how small I really am. I pull off a big impact in my everyday life, but that is really only in human terms. My walk through the forest floor will impact billions of organisms, perhaps even end the lives of millions of them, but won't have anything to do with the other 99.9999999% of this continent, even less of the Earth, and won't even touch the thousands of delicate ecosystems hidden beneath the surface of the ocean. If our planet went the way of Alderon, it would have even less of an impact on the universal level.

As we walked back to the road, Ssack mentioned that he felt that these forests were made for the dinosaurs. All the ferns and thick growth in a thick, humid, and rainy climate transported us back to the age of what are now but fossils. These massive creatures went extinct through no fault of their own, whether it was by way of a comet impact or a catclysmic climate change. Today we may be standing on the brink of yet another Earth shattering climate change, but this time it very well may be a climate change percipitated by the planet's dominate species. Six billion and counting. Perhaps it was time that we let those tiny organisms that think that we are massive re-inherit the Earth.