I have bad news and good news (remember that order, so you always end on an up note):
The bad news is I can’t tell you the good news yet.
See, your birthday is still three weeks away, or five months on your calendar. And I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so just read the top and bottom of this letter. You can read the middle on your actual birthday, Nov. 1.
I’m gonna need you to Heel on these ellipses, and Come when you see the next ellipses. You know the drill: I’ll double-click when it’s time to go.
Heel…
I GOT YOU THE BEST BIRTHDAY GIFT OF YOUR LIFE!! I’m pretty confident in that assessment, seeing as how it’s the first birthday of your life. Still, I’m pretty sure you’ll dig it.
Meet Chuck D’Angelo Barksdale, or Charlie as he’s known at the Pet Orphans Rescue of Southern California.
Charlie is your age, but that’s about it for similarities. He was plucked from a shelter in Victorville and arrived at the new hoosegow in late September. He walks with a pronounced limp, and his right front paw juts to the right, as if he’s been run over at least once in his life.
He is purebred mutt. He looks like a Pit bull that had his way with a Corgi that had her way with a Dachshund. He’s 25 pounds, a third your weight, but more than half your length.
His paperwork just said he was “Great with people on approach/ good with other dogs/ good with cats” but “HIGH ENERGY – Yard Recommended.” The orphanage said he was hard to home because he was so hyper.
Of course, the orphanage never met you.
Remember how ready you were to play at daybreak? How I could never tug-of-war enough? Remember the reluctance to part with any pup you met on our walks?
Human consciousness was a mistake. And the error has commenced a terrestrial reboot.
I wish there were a way around this truth, because it is terrifying news for most humans who live here. And blasphemous news for those who believe the planet was created with them in mind. They also account for most humans who live here.
But there’s a powerful scientific argument to be made that we over-evolved. The expansive growth of our brains, particularly in the frontal cortex, gave rise to a system overload — human consciousness. And that overload has triggered the Universe’s planetary reset button.
First, the evidence that mankind overevolved:
No animal on Earth has as large a brain, which made childbirth a leading cause of death for us before modern medicine.
That frontal cortex has propelled developed nations into a collective sadness; suicides in America, for example, outpace homicides three-to-one.
‘Despair Diseases’ — drug addiction, opioid dependence, alcoholism, etc. — have become the epidemic of choice and the new way out for nations that can afford boredom.
We have altered the planet to suit our comforts, an outcome Darwin could have never foreseen. The Earth boils and animals join the extinction list at record speed.
That doesn’t even take into account two byproducts of consciousness: faith and politics. Those forces of conviction — coupled with the power of technological enforcement — make consciousness an existential threat.
For us. The Universe has its own failsafe.
Consider how long some species have existed at the top of the planet’s food chain. Humans have been apex predators, and atop the chain, for 40,000 years. In that geological blink, we have brought the planet to the brink of a new mass extinction in the form of climate change, nuclear warfare and natural resource-disparities.
Compare that to the dinosaur. It ruled the planet for 200 million years — with no known consciousness. The only thing that knocked them from the hierarchy was a meteor that choked 90% of all life on the planet and ushered an Ice Age before the current holocene.
Mark Twain once said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And scientists are beginning to ponder the second lyric of the thesis, the reboot.
Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott set the science world on its ear in 2019 with his “Doomsday Theory” calculation, which predicts a 95 percent chance that the human race will cease to exist within 12 to 18,000 years. In the 1960’s, Gott gained notoriety when he predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he said would fall in 2 1/2-24 years. It fell in 21.
In her 2015 Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction.
She surmises that “the human species contributes to a disruption in the natural world – even without intending to – because of our innate capabilities to alter the planet at this stage of our cultural evolution. Homo sapiens have the ability to adapt relatively quickly to almost any environment on this planet’s surface. Other species, however, have a hard time relocating to new, suitable habitats. They are unable to migrate ahead of current rapid ecological changes, or are hampered by artificial barriers such as roadways, cityscapes, and suburban sprawl, which increase discontinuity between viable habitats throughout the world.”
The consciousness of comfort.
So what’s the right amount of consciousness? Apes have shown they are capable of murder and rape outside their tribes, so that’s too much. Cat’s don’t fetch, and their love is capricious. So that’s too little.
The perfect amount appears to be the loved, domesticated dog.
Take Jadie. She is unaware of her own mortality, looks, manners or even Earthly duties beyond existence. Yet she is perfectly aligned with the planet’s interests and fundamental goal. Plus she loves every human she meets, despite what we’re doing to her planet.
In the California gubernatorial recall election, we were asked, if Gavin Newsom were recalled, who would get our votes JUST IN CASE. There were dozens of candidates, and a write-in option. I wrote in Jadie. The recall failed, so Jadie never got her political chance. But she had just the right consciousness for the job.
That doesn’t do much for the human predicament, of course. But the news there need not be as bleak as it sounds.
Sure, we’ll get 1% of the dinosaur reign. But we had a good run, full of species highlights, like Bazooka Bubblegum, Tiger King and Dockers.
