The kids and I had a battle in the living room the other day. When I say battle, I don’t mean the usual battle with my kids— getting chores accomplished. I mean the fun kind of battle with vehicles and action figures.
These days, when I say kids, I mean my two younger children, the littles as my wife and I sometimes refer to them in texts and phone calls. My oldest is now 14 and, while she will always be my kid, she is not so much a kid anymore. She’s more interested in her phone, tablet and laptop than she is in sitting on the floor and making little plastic heroes and villains battle for the fate of the world.
It makes me a little wistful to realize she’s now too grown for such things. At least I still have the other two for a few more years. When the time comes, rather than get rid of He-Man, Skeletor, and the rest, I’ll just carefully pack them away. With luck (and a few lifestyle changes) I will hopefully still be alive to share them with the grandkids.
Here, my thoughts go from wistful to melancholy. It might not matter if there are grandkids in my future. It might be a matter of if there is a world for grandkids in their future.
Please note, I didn’t say if there will be a world in the future. Of course, there will be a world. It is mankind’s vanity that when we contemplate our own destruction, phrases like “destroy the earth” and “end of the world” are employed.
The earth was here millions of years before us. It will be here millions of years afterward. I don’t think human beings could actually render the planet lifeless.
Lifeless? No. Uninhabitable by humans? Yes. Sadly, that outcome seems quite possible, even quite probable. No more humans, but as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, “Life, uh— finds a way.”
There is already life in subterranean caverns and deep ocean trenches surviving in some of the most hostile and adverse conditions imaginable. Right here on earth are ecosystems very alien to what we think of as “life”, based not around photo- but chemo- synthesis, substituting chemical energy
for sunlight.
In Planet of the Apes Charlton Heston says, “There has to be something better than man.” If we aren’t careful, nature will test out that hypothesis.
The problem is everyone has different ideas about how to avert the looming crisis. Worse, many of us won’t even be here for the hard work necessary to preserve human civilization (such as it is). That task falls to the younger generations, the kids playing with action figures upon the living room floor.
All I can do is hope, in the midst of that play, I am imparting lessons to help prepare them for that work. With luck, others are doing the same with theirs. Kids like them will have to be the heroes the future needs.
Otherwise our children might not inherit the earth. It might instead belong to the chemosynthetic bacteria in the bottom of the ocean.
