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The Sixth Extinction   - - -


 

The stories we started with.

Long and long ago, our early ancestors told stories. Around the campfire, or gathered in a cave, they talked or sang about how the world was made, and what made it so.


(Incidentally, have you ever wondered how many years, how many generations, it took our earliest ancestors' language to expand from holding only sounds which meant something like   MEAT   and   MINE to "Once upon a time"?)


But those early people began to tell stories.
Different stories around different fires, retold often, and remembered for generations.


And they saw that people grew, aged, and died.
With ceremony or without it, we dance a while, then fade and disappear.
    Kings and commoners all.


The One True Prophecy.


Looking backwards or forwards,
it's the same truth all around.







Who knows when?
And what matters?
(The book's title is 'The Hour of Our Death')             
Wrapped in sackcloth or in gold, what's the difference?
Buried in a box, or sent down the river on a burning pyre;
left up a tree for leopards, or sealed in a mausoleum
... what really matters?


We walk through the cemetery and we think . . ..
We have our hopes and illusions...delusions?



Hopes and Fears

Unless, like this happy little piggy, we believe
we will fly off into the golden heaven-in-the-sky.

Not seeing the farmer's wife who dreams of bacon.


Ego is difficult to abandon.

Children scratch their names on a tree.
We make monuments in the hope of being remembered.

Remembered beyond the usual span of the minds of family and friends.

The Process of Memory?


What you see depends on where you're standing.
What you remember depends on what you think of what you saw.

Some of our ancestral groups could make marks to keep the stories alive.
Colour on walls, or symbols chipped in stone.
Other groups had only the spoken word to tell of their history,
whether real and remembered, or imagined and embellished.

Before there was any form of writing, groups defined themselves by the stories
... " in the dream-time" ... "when Rangi and Papa lifted the sky from the forest"
... "Adam and Eve, the first parents" ...
"Hwang-Un and Ung-Yo, the first humans amongst the gods" ...
the stories were told and retold.
Once writing of any sort came into use , (carved onto stone, or meticulously copied on vellum or parchment to make precious books, ) and then when the printing press was invented, doctrines could be spread more widely, believed and followed.

Groups would make vows of obedience.

The pinkie promises of children became elaborate prayers, chants, oaths and dances. And perhaps beliefs.

The Pinkie Promise


The comfort of stories, giving humans a past,
a reason for continuing, a belonging with others.
And acceptance of death as a part of life?
(Perhaps not, depending on what you think of all those heavenly promises)


Individually, our strength fades, our abilities shrink, mental and physical.
"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" as Shakespeare wrote about ageing in "As You Like It"

Here are 'Diminuendo' for the fading of hearing, and 'Tangled Thoughts' for the increasing incoherence between our ears.


Diminuendo Tangled Thoughts

We live longer, and there are more and more of us.
'More' becomes 'too many'.


The AI Future
We have become too many, too greedy for land and profit.
Our advance has meant extinction for many species (When did you last see or hear a frog?)
and our clever inventions now don't need the humans who made them.

(Bright students are now searching for any career which cannot be done better by AI.)


The Future will Devour
 A trophy of the last carnivore


         
  What might be left of our bodies
 and our buildings


This age of the supremacy of humans has been called the Anthropocene.
Scientists disagree on when the Anthropocene began, and on when, or if, it will end.
But the signals are getting louder, and closer.

Our changes, which we thought were progress, have made drastic changes to our climate
and to the possibility of continued livelihood for many species of animal.
Including humans.

Artificial Intelligence has greatly diminished the possibilites for humans.
There is talk of The Anthropocene Extinction - the Sixth Extinction in the history of the Earth.


Some extinctions in the past have been very fast (think of a huge asteroid hitting our planet, or another Krakatoa exploding.)
Some have taken just a few years of man's greed & mismanagement (the moa and the dodo, some bats, frogs).

We can hope that you, your children, your grandchildren, might have time to repair the damage and live a good life for a while.
Meanwhile, do what you can to stop, or slow, the plundering of earth's resources in the search of profit.
And perhaps, just perhaps, you might be able to reverse our decline.



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