Jack Tame: Save our species? Too boring

Photo / iStock

Opinion

The silliest thing about the potential end of our world is it's so boring, people don't care. Who'd have thunk it?

For all those images of Armageddon - the biblical and Bruce Willis versions - when our species' smartest minds foresaw the end of times, we sat on our collective hands and sighed a collective "meh".

No people gathered on a hilltop. No lovers embracing, lips locked and tears pooling, as a gargantuan fiery asteroid scythes through the atmosphere, burning up everything in an almighty galactic fart.

Nah. We just kept drilling and burning and the last thing anyone heard from a human being was someone complaining about the price of gas.

Perhaps I have read my fellow sapiens all wrong. Perhaps we're actually soothed by the prospect of the party wrapping up, an all-good-things-come-to-an-end approach.

It's kind of nice, I suppose. Zen. Calming to think we aren't any more deserving of continued existence than the millions of species before us that have spawned, flourished and died out.

Pressure is off on the existential front.

One hundred and eight billion humans have existed on this planet. Scientists estimate about one bone in every billion will become a fossil. Therefore, if things go wrong sometime soon we can expect only about 100 complete human skeletons to exist in fossil form.

If a dog of the future digs up a dude, it's one lucky pooch indeed.

Of course, even without fossil evidence, any future palaeontologists would still work out mankind had existed. They would plot it in the Earth. The advent of agriculture, the industrial age, they would see climate change in the rock.

And perhaps one day after we disappeared and Earth hit reset, this futuristic species would develop its own science and art and debate the history of mankind.

They would look at evidence of our technologies, our expansion across the globe.

"They must have been smart enough to know they were warming the Earth," someone would say.

"So why didn't they do anything about it?"

• Jack Tame is on Newstalk ZB Saturdays, 9am-midday