The Distinction of a Species

I watched a movie once when I was a little girl about a disease that swept through the world and turned people into dust.  I was so disturbed by it, I had one of those moments wherein your perception of the world is altered along with your relationship with it.  And not because nearly everybody the lead character knew died one-by-one leaving only him and the heroine to repopulate the earth, not because of the tragedy of whole families being wiped out virtually overnight, but because I realized for the first time that my whole world was vulnerable.  Does anybody else recall the moment when that realization came to them for the first time?

'Of course the world is vulnerable', my mom said, 'life is precious, a meteor, a plague or any one of hundreds of natural disasters could forever change the face of this planet and life on it' - but it was more than that.  I realized for the first time how dependant we humans are on each other.  Our skill sets have evolved over generations and become so specific, I realized how much knowledge and progression would be lost.  If I were the last person on earth, I couldn't run or repair a power station or build solar powered panels for my house, and if I could, supplies would eventually run out and I couldn't build more.  Where would I get gas for my car?  There would be plenty cars around so that wasn't a problem, but once gas stations ran dry?  What then?  I am not a doctor, and after all the supplies in the pharmacies expire, I don't know anything about using plants to treat illness and disease.  If we managed to propagate, I could teach children to read and write, but I couldn't teach them physics.  Back then we didn't have the Internet to answer our questions only the library, but how much knowledge gained since the inception of the computer would be lost forever?  And then the biggie:  once the stuff in the grocery store went bad, what would we do for food?  So in my little girl mind, even if you survived and everybody else was turned into dust, you quite possibly would end up starving to death or dying of disease so maybe dust was a better way to go.  As I get older, I realize we would endure.  We would gather, organize, plant crops and reform little communities - it would be a very different life, but not necessarily a bad one. 

There have been many movies since that portray the demise of the human race usually involving some sudden and hugely destructive force, but what if we, us humans, are the cause of our own demise?  What if we build, grow, expand and consume ourselves out of existence?  Extinction is nothing new, species have been coming and going and evolving on our planet since it's birth, a typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance.  We the people have only been around an estimated 250,000 years, that's like a nano-second in the grand scheme of things, and in that nano-second we have inflicted more change on our environment or adversely affected or displaced more living species than any other organism in earths 4.54 BILLION years.  We assume we have the right to permanently alter landscapes and think we are very clever for taking a year or two to develop new organisms in a genetic science lab when it takes Mother Nature hundreds of thousands of years to accomplish the same thing.  We are powerful, rulers of the planet and at the top of the food chain.

I can't help but wonder, will another intelligent species be uncovering our bones and the remains of our cities, a 'lost civilization' out of earth one day?  Will they sadly shake their heads and say: How unusual, they destroyed the world that supported them and designed their own demise.