January 25th
Today, we watched a video titled Space Monkeys. It showed a test monkey that was sent into space, and the video depicted his arrival back to Earth. He touches down in the middle of an urban city, but devoid of life of any sort. The way I interpreted this was that life on Earth has ended, and the monkey is completely alone. While it was later discussed in class that the city he landed in was actually Chernobyl, it was the intention of the video makers to make the entire world seem devoid of life. Either they all died off, or they evacuated Earth and went to inhabit a different planet. Either way, life on Earth does not exist anymore as it did.
Also, earlier in the video, the counter in the spaceship reads that the monkey has been out in space for around 50 years. I took this as meaning that humanity’s existence on Earth will end sometime in the next 50 years, at least in this video. It seems that the video is trying to describe how, at the rate we’re going at right now, humanity will go extinct within a single lifetime. It seems that movements have progressed in recent memory that would slow that process a lot more. But to many people, the extinction of the human race seems inevitable. Like the damage we’ve done to the planet cannot be repaired, even partially. This may seem like a pessimistic view to take, but it is a genuine possibility.
My view of all of this is that humanity as it currently stands will eventually not exist anymore, but that doesn’t mean that it will go extinct. I believe that if something happens that disrupts the way humanity survives, the species will evolve in order to thrive in new environments, just how evolution is supposed to function. Therefore, our version of humans will eventually disappear, but that happens all the time. Every time a new cure for disease is developed, the previous species of humans goes away, and the new version that’s immune to that disease will live on and reproduce. But that doesn’t exactly fit my definition of extinction when the race still lives on, just maybe in smaller numbers and not in the same environment. My takeaway from the video is that humanity will eventually not inhabit Earth, and that can easily be seen as a catastrophe. But in my opinion, that is just progress at work, because evolution is a natural progression of events.