Monday, March 14, 2011

Good Golly, Miss Molly


Consider the ant. It is born in a hectic, seemingly insane environment. It doesn’t live long. To it, 24 hours must seem as an entire year does to us. Now consider a Galapagos tortoise (170 years), or the humble bristlecone pine (5,000 years). To them, a day is a second.

To us, a day is a day. But to the earth, a day is an almost impossibly fast flash, 10,000 times shorter than the last flash of lightning you saw.

So to the earth, an earthquake is a very, very almost insignificant blip, on par with the seventy-odd trillion earthquakes that have gone before and will happen again.

The passage of time is a very odd thing to consider; we can only view it as it appears to us. There are only a few givens: we will, most of us, expire before our hundredth year. Some will succumb much earlier, a few a bit later. But we all live under a death sentence that is graven in the very dust of stars.

When something like the earthquake of 2011 (I don’t know what it will popularly be called in the future) happens, it starkly demonstrates the impassivity of this earth we live on. We tend to cling to things to blame: Al Qaeda did it; Nostradamus predicted it; it’s a Zionist conspiracy and all the Jews were mysteriously absent the day the reactors melted down.

But the reality is, the dinosaurs DID die. At many points in the timeline, 98% of every species on this planet were completely wiped out, through no fault of Osama Been, and the other reality is that there is no magical Jesus, Allah or Buddha who is going to sail to our rescue — look to Marvel Comics for a more likely superhero.

Hey, I’m really not kidding here. Have you taken a look at the moon lately? You think those craters are party paint?

I just hope I get through my human-time-allotted seventy generic years with little mishap and from now on I’ll definitely think twice before I squash an ant out of existence.


Y'know, I'm not exactly sure quite what I'm on about here, but watching what happened in Japan for the last few days has made me feel, uh, really, really small.


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