The Naive and the Connive

Before the tiger entered the forest, and the forest was devised, a forging of gargantuan magnitude contrived.

There was a time when a supernova exploded causing a massive shockwave that stirred a dense cloud of gases and dust. The solar winds swept away the lighter gases leaving behind the denser material that condensed into larger celestial particles, swirling around the Sun.

On one of these celestial particles, denser materials sank to the center and lighter materials floated to the top, with some gases still within the orbit under the influence of gravity. The spewed hotter particles that moved away from the sun, cooled and were pulled back into the solar system, often colliding with the other planets.

Such innumerable collisions probably deposited water on one planet that could have, in what could be termed as one in an undecipherable enumeration, under some very distinct fortuitous circumstances, led to the formation of life, as we know.

Single-celled life started to grow, and then started photosynthesis. The levels of free oxygen began to rise which led to the formation of Eukaryotes – organisms with a nucleus bound inside a membrane. Sexual reproduction with the cells occurred and multi-cellular life started to thrive, following which earliest plants and animals came into existence. Then came the invertebrates, insects, molluscs, etc., followed by plants, dinosaurs, animals, birds, primates and finally humans.

This entire process happened over a period of 4500 million years with 5 major extinction events, wiping more than 50% - 95% of species in one or the other event. Charles Darwin in ‘The Origin of Species’ stated that the mutual relation of an organism to another, improving to one, might either be improving or exterminating the other. Many scientists concur that we are in the middle of the Holocene or the Sixth Extinction event, fueled by the human need and greed, population overgrowth and overconsumption of resources, which would probably wipe out most of the species (or even make Earth an uninhabitable place for eternity).

According to Fermi’s paradox, the lifetime of an intelligent civilization is extremely short (and thus there is never an intelligent extraterrestrial life), and perhaps humans fall in that category too. Out of 8 million species of animal and plant life on Earth, 1 million are currently/immediately threatened with extinction (and unfortunately, a lot of these species are megafauna and flora). An estimated 500 species have gone extinct in the past 100 years alone, plainly related to human activity.