This is Laughing at the Apocalypse, a new series of absurdist vignettes from the end of the world. For normal Horrific/Terrific posts, go here.
Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid hit the Earth at such a great force that it broke into thousands of pieces, and those pieces were shot into ballistic flight, basically setting fire to the sky, which was then covered in ash for a hundred thousand years. This was the worst day in Earth’s history. The only things that survived were avian dinosaurs and the very smallest plants, which were so very small, that they could derive all the energy they needed from thousands of years of dim-grey sunlight. For these plants, and the nanoplankton that feasted on them, it was actually the best day on Earth. No more fighting with bigger, stronger organisms. Suddenly these tiny plants, probably just one cell thick, could thrive in relative darkness, gently thrumming nutrients into soil, becoming their own bosses.
Then the ash cleared and everything intensified. The age of reptiles and darkness was over. Now it was time for stonking great mammals. Whales, horses, camels, bats, hyraxes. Anything that that could be hewn from thousand-year-old calcium deposits; anything that could be imagined from cosmic dust. In this sense, mass extinction was good, actually. Because it made space for humans, the greatest mammals of all, the greatest living things of all: they had thumbs, a superior apex form, powers of conceptualisation — they were cosmic polymaths, basically. There’s a lesson here, and it’s that destruction and creation are the same thing. And there’s only a finite amount of space in any given ecosystem. Sometimes you need a giant asteroid to make a big hole which can be filled with GOOD animals. The time of lizards was an epoch of monoculture and stagnation. The time of mammals — this time, the time we are in now — is an opportunity for growth and agenda-setting.
Extinction is change, and change is progress. How do we grow from here? What event is going to puncture our ecosystem to make space for the next big thing? We don’t have to wait, we can fabricate the event ourselves. That’s why the dinosaurs were so inferior; they just rolled around and ate each other for aeons until something obliterated them. That won’t happen to us, because we are the obliterators. We need to grow, spread, colonise — and to do that someone is going to have to die. How do we destroy Mars and make it our own? Or rather, how do we destroy ourselves and make room for a new strain of humans, capable of living on Mars? A colony of demigods who can not only withstand toxic Martian regolith, but who thrive on it. Imagine eating reddish toxic soil for breakfast and standing 8ft tall outside your Martian house, confidently inhaling the thin hazy air, hands on your hips like any proud superhuman. Are you a botanist? Are you perhaps interested in the challenge of transforming the regolith into something that can support plant life? Well you can forget it. No need to grow plants when we can evolve to eat dirt, and learn to farm sentient auto-kinetic lab-grown meats (e.g. animals) which we can then hunt, to maintain predator instincts, and eat at grand ceremonial feasts, to maintain a sense of community.
I get it, you’re worried about radiation poisoning. Did you not consider that by the time we get to Mars, or Venus, or the many moons of Jupiter, our superior species would have evolved to withstand a grotesque amount of radiation? An amount that only present-day cockroaches can absorb. You may also be wondering why we need to do any of this, seeing as we’re perfectly evolved to live on Earth without having to resort to eating toxic soil and hunting lab-grown animals. You won’t die of radiation poisoning on Earth, sure. But you will die of something else: a slow degenerative disease that only effects the meek and unadventurous. A horrible affliction that atrophies the brain and boils you slowly so you don’t notice. You distract yourselves with busy work, such as pretending to establish democratic nation states, inventing charters that protect human rights, putting children into education prisons. These distractions are lethal. By staying on Earth, the thing you’ll die of is boredom. Imagine: choosing to be boring when you instead could colonise the galaxy.