Extinctions: Critical/Creative Reflection
After billions of years, on a lonely planetary speck in a spiraling cosmos, organic matter evolved, and thus formation and destruction took new forms: life and death.
But these new forces were not synonymous with their predecessors. Where destruction had enabled formation, life and death became dichotomous.
Let us imagine ourselves to be observers of this strange world. We hover over the hot young Earth, as it simmers and seethes in its steamy atmosphere. Slowly the planet cools, and vaporous clouds condense and precipitate to form shallow oceans. From this tepid primordial soup, the earliest rudiments of life develop, and gradually, hesitantly, branch out to become increasingly complex.
We remain sedentary as time quickens around us, and vast continents rise and shift and pull apart. Landscapes change and sea-levels rise and fall with climatic shifts; Ice around the poles expands and contracts as though the Earth itself breathes along with the life it sustains.
As previously stated, death is necessary outcome of life, and death in totality is extinction. Situated in our place of omniscience, we observe species fading quietly out of existence as new ones evolve; each creature resigning its place in the unconscious fulfilment of an underlying evolutionary necessity.
There are, of course, instances where extinctions are not driven by natural processes; cataclysmic events still cause devastation and take no consideration of evolutionary merit in their determination of species mortality.
In such cases these is a unique intersection between destruction and formation, as well as life and death. The death of one species enables the development of another to fill the niche, and destruction enables the formation of new ecosystems and populations. And yet, paradoxically, life itself exists as a constant struggle against death. Living things are born, and instinctively know that they must fight to survive long enough to reproduce, before death takes them. All life exists from the perspective that death is inevitable and permanent, and the only form of immortality available is through passing genes onto the next generation. There are animals that can barely beyond the point of viable reproduction, because what’s the point? The kangaroo, for instance, has its teeth constantly worn down by the silica in grass. To combat this, kangaroos have several sets of molars. When one pair is worn down, they fall out and a new pair moves forward in the jaw to replace them. However, kangaroos have a limited number of these replacement molars. If a kangaroo lives long enough for the last set to be worn down, it can no longer eat and it starves to death. There’s no (or very little) natural selection pressure to change this, because few kangaroos survive long enough to wear out all their teeth, and the ones that do won’t have many (if any) offspring. Life always ends in death, so all of life is geared towards the survival of genes rather than the survival of the individual. This is an example of the dichotomy of life and death. Life exists to delay death, but not defeat it. They exist in harmony.
However, the real problem occurs when life and death and all the chaos and shifting and fighting they bring are looked at from anything other than a linear perspective. Humans can only perceive three dimensions, and thus only exist in the fourth dimension (time) one slice at a time. All of life operates on this same assumption. The fourth dimension is immutable, immovable, impossible to change. But looking at the world from our limited perspective is undeniably anthropocentric. We can only perceive the fourth dimension linearly, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only way to experience it. Looking at life from the perspective where time is simply another dimension, all the restrictions that force life to take a particular path, fall apart and lose their meaning. From this non-linear perspective, all of life can be perceived as a single organism: a shape-shifting, time-travelling “Bioblob” (Archer et al., 1991). Instead of many organisms competing individually against the inevitable march of death, life is instead one organism branching out in millions of directions, exploring a myriad of evolutionary pathways, with each individual cell connected by the cycle of life. Time is far more flexible than humans perceive it to be, and life and death regain some of the characteristics of those primeval forces, termed formation and destruction.
A species, we do instinctively grasp this on some level. On a cynical level, we know that life is a relentless march forward with one day following the next into oblivion, but that’s just the surface. Look deeper. The best way to discover what we really think is to look at our stories. One story is just an individual’s imagination. A pattern across thousands of stories is something more. Every writer knows that you can’t write a story that isn’t, on the deepest level, about truth. Without a truth to build the story around, it will never work. It will always be hollow and false. Stories are where we explore the real truths that we can’t talk about in the “real world”. Looking more deeply at these stories can tell us what humans really think of life, death, extinction, and time. And the most obvious place to start looking is time travel stories like A Sound of Thunder.
Everyone knows that the past changes the present. That’s how the world functions: through causation. But in such narratives, the future also changes the present. It’s obvious in the time travel stories. But take a moment. Think harder. Our future changes our present, right now. We don’t need time travel to see that. We just ignore it. Humans look far into the future and plan, and plot, and try and figure out what’s going on. Time isn’t linear. That’s just the only way we can deal with thinking about it.