Submitted by lemon_grass in Climate_Changed (edited )

An Elegy for The Future by lemon_grass


2021 C.E.

This text is dedicated to lives cut short, and lives that would have been. Life cut short. Life that would have been.

The pressures of natural selection would have brought you into existence, however, the homo sapien civilization ended the Holocene in the 20th century C.E. in an effort known then as 'industrialization.' Due to industrialization, the average temperature of our home planet was increased by 5C over an exceptionally small period of time. As a result, the area which would have become your native habitat never came into existence. In an instant, your life vanished from the realm of possibility. What separates you from all other possible yet nonexistant life forms is that you would have existed had the energy balance of the atmosphere remained stable over a relatively small timescale. This situation is particularly tragic. Your absence was shocking and unpredictable, and in the end, inevitable. Your story remains unwritten. By and large, you exist as an undifferentiated mass, a palpable gap, in the tree of life. Everything that follows will always be insufficent. In your absence, we will always be insufficent.

I want you to know that we live in the light of a beautiful sun. Your family was born in its light. The earth rotates around its axis as it revolves around this sun. One period of rotation is called a 'day,' and one period of revolution is called a 'year.' When your area of the earth crossed the shadow cast by the sun as the earth rotated, the sunlight would refract through the atmosphere, producing beautiful orange and red colors in the sky. This was called 'morning.' In periods of darkness, the moon would reflect light from the sun to the earth, illuminating the 'night.' In your time, the Earth was mostly covered by a large ocean. Your family was born in the ocean. Later on, some branches of your family spread to the land, the air, and also deep within Earth's crust. Each member of your family shares a genetic structure called "DNA," which encodes the information necessary for the production and reproduction of the molecules necessary for life. Your family is unimaginably large. It has persisted for billions of Earth-years. Unfortunately, large parts of this family are currently threatened. Though we are expected to persist, it is possible that many branches of our family may die out. This is called 'extinction.' Slowly, the particular physical manifestations of our DNA-based life will change. All particular manifestations will, in time, be replaced. However, some replacements, some extinctions, are unnatural. There is one member of our family which seeks to disrupt the balace. They denounce their origin, and seek to colonize the universe. Their most dominant societies are organized in a hierarchial manner. This hierarchy was produced through thousands of years of psychological and physical violence. Exiting the hierarchy would mean death for the majority of homo sapiens, and thus, they were forced to surrender their natural freedom to psychologically enrich a small number of cancerous forms. This state did not come into being until 200,000 years after their differentiation. The state lasted for 3,000 earth-years, until it collapsed due to complications from ecological devestation. This incident in our family's history has caused an unimaginable number of life forms to be prevented from existing. I am sorry that you did not spend any time with us, although, we will all soon join you in non-existance. There are pockets of molten rock in the earth which may bubble up to the crust, causing massive explosions. Such an explosion may end DNA-based life. In a few billion years, the sun will expand, rendering the earth a lifeless, molten blob. We will all die. We are sorry that we could not have died with you, with the countless generations of your offspring. I am sorry that you never felt the gentle heat of the sun. We will long for you as long as we persist. We will spend billions of years remembering you. Perhaps we will carry your memory to the stars. The scale of the injustice visited upon you is difficult to comprehend.

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