Being Human on a Planet that is 4.5 Billion Years Old

Everyone reading this blog post is Human, unless someone trained their dog REALLY well, and we share this planet with approximately 8.7 million other species. We are not the fastest, the biggest, the most numerous, or the strongest, but we are the smartest. we have explored the majority of the surface of our planet and explored a lot of space outside of our planet. We have solved almost every problem we have come across. It was cold so we made fire, we wanted to explore so we invented the wheel, we got sick so we found an antidote, we wanted to entertain ourselves constantly so we made social media, etc. We have done a lot of good for ourselves, but at what cost to everything else?

          First of all, we have polluted and damaged almost every part of the Earth if not all of it. we had devastating wars that make large amounts of land uninhabitable by anything without consequence, and we tend to believe that all other life on this planet is less than our own. Don't git me wrong, I love being a human, but we have done some pretty bad things. Worst part is, we have done so much bad in such a short period of time that the Earth can not keep up. 

          So the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and humans have existed for 200,000 years. To put this into perspective, if you take the longest book in the world, Artamene with 2.1 million words, and compared it to the Earth's existence, human's existence wouldn't even be a paragraph. If the height of mount Everest represented the Earth's age, then the mountain representing our existence  would be shorter than a newborn baby. 

          You see, up until about 200 years ago, humans were not all that harmful to the environment, but these past 200 years have ruined that reputation. The Earth has had a system of taking care of itself for its whole life, it just takes a while. The dinosaurs going extinct and dust filling the sky after the meteor hit 65 million years ago took millions of years for the Earth to recover. An ice age lasts for thousands of years to go away. In fact, an increase of CO2 levels like ours today would take 5000 to 20000 years under normal circumstances. Yet here we are, raising the world’s average temp by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in 200 years and raising the oceans acidity by .1 pH, or lowering the pH by .1 on the pH scale. This means that, at this rate, at the end of the century most of the shelled species in our oceans will be extinct or endangered which will devastate our oceans. Not only that, but the increase of the Earth’s temperature also creates a lot of problems, most of which I went over in another post.

            It is true that the Earth goes through stages and has always recovered from them, but up until now it has always had time to adapt. Humans have disturbed 4.5 billion years of evolution and sustainability in 200 years all because we want to make things better for us. Being a Human on Earth is great, but being any other species is miserable. If we don’t change our ways and learn to respect the 8.7 million other species we share this Earth with, we will bring about the end of the world.

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