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| Do you like cockroaches? In the future they may like you — in a salad. |
Let’s face it, humanity is a pest species.
Directly or indirectly, we destroy forests. We wreck and pillage the natural habitats of other animals and plants for what we perceive as our own benefit. We foul and clog rivers and streams. We pollute oceans. We poison the air. We gas the skies. We chop down mountains, to get the coal inside of them, to burn and add to both air and water pollution. We endanger other species.
Wherever we go, anywhere on the planet, our modus operandi, intentionally or otherwise, is to upset nature’s setup.
Do other species find us disgusting?
You could probably make book on it.
In all probability other animals, with the possible exception of dogs and cats (and I’m not all that sure about cats) find us repulsive and loathsome. Yes, we leave behind a lot of rotting trash which is a useful source of food to rodents, raccoons, ants, maggots, and cockroaches. But to the millions of other life forms on the planet — or what is left of them — we are the equivalent of what those same cockroaches mean to us. Moreover, the vermin could, if need be, get along without us.
Fortunately for Planet Earth, Mother Nature has a nasty trick or two up her own sleeve to keep the damage we’re doing under control.
When the dinosaurs became too plentiful, too massive, and too voracious for the planet, she whacked Earth with a giant meteorite that changed the weather and killed off the dinosaurs. In time the planet healed. It gave up on most lizards, leaving behind only enough snakes, crocodiles and other reptiles to limit the growth of some other varieties of living protein.
Meanwhile, instead of dinosaurs, she gave monkeys a shot at being the dominant species, which with a few eons of evolution is how we came to be in charge of screwing things up.
Now most scientists are telling us that humanity has a dozen years, and maybe less, to fix the mess we’ve made, or most of us are goners. Deserts and oceans will expand. Arable land will contract. Glaciers and polar ice caps will vanish. Vast populations of the ocean-going species we devour will become extinct, along with the coral reefs that nurture them. And the air will be rich with an aromatic blend of sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane-rich cow farts.
Who will you be killed by
when the global famine arrives?
You know perfectly well where all that leads. It leads to famine. It leads to war. It leads to desperate people raiding each others’ nations for food. Which will lead to nuclear strikes. Which will lead to retaliation. Which will lead, inexorably, to the obliteration, or near-obliteration, of homo sapiens — along with a huge bunch of innocent bystander species.
In fact, self-extinction as a cure for over proliferation of humanity seems welded into our DNA. How else to explain Donald Trump and other nationalists around the world working so hard to dissolve the bonds of cooperation that could save us from our own offal — bonds ranging from the UN, to the Iranian nuclear treaty, to such basic stuff as civil discourse and human decency?
It’s the baked-in drive to self-annihilate. Nursing mice, when disturbed, eat their own offspring. It’s in their genes. Humanity eventually kills itself off via war, or self-suffocation, or self-poisoning. It’s in our DNA.
Nature gives lemmings a suicidal urge. It gives moths a deep yearning for self-immolation on light bulbs. It gives rodents and guppies the notion that all will be well for a while if only they eat their own offspring. And it gives us the immutable urge or incompetence to hand control of the planet over to the likes of Donald Trump. Or to that thug of a prince in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who Trump so adores. Or to Kim Jong Whatzisface. Or insert your own favorite political thug’s name here. Or his hive of enabling lackeys.
Humanity is dead!
Long live the bugs!
And what will take our place after humanity cooks its own goose? I can’t know for sure, of course, but if I were a betting man I’d put my money on the cockroaches. They can live almost anywhere. They can dine on almost anything. They are tolerant of heat, a useful trait in a warming planet. Some of them can swim. Others can fly. And while they’re doing fine just as is, my bet is that, over time, unhindered by hordes of humanity who now keep trying to poison them, they’ll flourish and develop bigger brains.
Write this down and preserve it for any of your progeny — although they will be the rare exceptions — who survive humanity’s near total disappearance:
In time, ten-foot-tall cockroaches with IQs in excess of 250 will breed and herd human beings for food. In fact, that may be the only way our species will be able to continue, from the few of us left after the one-two punch of self-imposed nuclear and climate holocausts.
The gourmet cockroach
Some of us will of course try to hide under rocks, on in the empty spaces inside cockroach computer keyboards. But they will get us anyway, and trap us, and mate us. And when we are old enough and big enough, they will pick us up, masticate us and mix us with their saliva between their evolved mandibles, and swallow us alive and writhing.
Perhaps there will even be cockroach gourmets, and cockroach master chefs who will figure out appetizing (for a cockroach) ways to prepare us and serve us. Like semi-dismembered human, writhing on a fine coulis of sun-warmed vulture turds.
Thank you, Mr. Trump, arrogant humans, and climate deniers everywhere. And bon apétit!
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