Under the weather

Why, he's the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures that inhabit this earth. He has got to be coddled and housed and swathed and bandaged and upholstered to be able to live at all. He is a rickety sort of a thing, anyway you take him, a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repair...He has just that one stupendous superiority--his imagination, his intellect.
~Mark Twain, a Biography

Mark Twain's quote points out that the human condition is one in which we are often fighting off infirmities and inferiorities - illnesses both physical and mental.

I don't quite think that is the case, however, and my recent bout with illness (cold chills, headache, sore throat, general fluishness) left me a few moments to wonder about this very concept.

We are an incredibly hearty species. We came from a dessert climate, down from more damp forests, and have spread into every possible nook and cranny of our planet, finding ways to survive the harshest colds and heats, the wettest and driest environments that we can manage - often just so that we will know that we managed them.

We have not been laid low - for long, anyway - by the most horrific diseases, building up natural or synthetic immunities - and often, in the process, making those diseases even stronger so that we can have new challenges to make.

Sure, from time to time most individuals of our species pick up soemthing that we have to fight off, but for the most part, we fight it off. It might take a day or two, or a week or more in severe cases, but we survive. And even still, our species isn't set up so that an one individual is so important that the survival of mankind depends on that one person.

We have diversified.

We have spread.

We have, in every aspect of the word, conquered our world.

We are the rulers of all that we survey and have to find ways to fight over which one of us has which plot of land, which source of water, which respect of whichever group because we have been so successful.

Bow down before us, for we are legend.

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And someday, in spite of all our success, we shall fall. Nothing is forever, and we are no more permanent than were the dinosaurs whose reign we still have millions of years to go before we overtake.

And the world will continue in spite of and without us.

For all our hubris and success, we are but a blip on the timeline of Earth, third rock from the Sun. We might nuke the planet, turn the oceans and seas into toxic waste dumps where no life that we recognize can survive, heat the air until we flood ourselves silly while causing other parts of the land to freeze solid in response.

And yet life will out.

We probably wouldn't recognize the next dominant species as anything more than - at best - a mote of dust on our radar, but it will dominate our planet as have we. It will grow and evolve until it has neared or even overtaken our roles as terraformers, and we will be long gone.

If we're lucky, we will linger on as memories and legends, having tales told of our reign as we speak of the dinosaurs.

Let's enjoy this place while we've got time, folks.