Impossible Is A Word One Should Use With Great Caution

Living where I do in a community of hardworking, straight thinking, conservative fundamentalist, easygoing, fun-loving, culturally consolidated folk …I am an oddball among the vast majority of the folk of this community. That they like me anyway says a lot for their tolerance level. Plus nobody wants me to write the sequel to Small Town USA because they know full well that it’s not all as rosy here as that book might make it seem.

So I take myself off into realms of the past and the future, leaving the present to fend for itself as best it can.

Which is where the word ‘impossible’ comes into play.

Yes I do write fiction but most of it is not ‘impossible’.

I could cite, chapter and verse, what humankind has done in the past thousand years to make my point. Even the last century, nay decade, would clarify things significantly to those who say ‘impossible’. Just about everything we’ve accomplished was once ‘impossible’ or even beyond anybody’s imaginations. Look it up. You’ll be impressed. We’ve been going great guns just lately.

Give us another couple of thousand years, like the many thousands of years our species had in which to develop in many different ways. Some focused on one thing, some on another. We’re not talking about a different species here, folks. We’re talking about us, humankind, with exactly the same bodies and brains that we have today. Exactly the same. If we can do it, so could they.

We’ve only had ten thousand years to recuperate from something that could have wiped us and everything else from the face of Earth. As the exact same people that we are today we’ve been around for say 200,000 years. All we have to do is look at our own recent history – the past decade, century, millennium – and if you’re still wondering if we could have ‘done this before’ you can stop now. If we can do it now we could have done it before.

Not only that, but an event like the one that happened twelve thousand years ago could happen again and there we would be. Do not pass Go do not collect two hundred dollars. All that genius and hard work down the drain – again.

What we’ve done in a decade, a century, a millennium, ten millennia … think on this for a minute: in our present form we’ve been here for 200,000 years, not 10,000 or 20,000. We haven’t changed a whit as a species in all that time. Are you going to tell me we’ve become smarter? We haven’t.

Earth changes over time; we haven’t. Earth periodically gets massive ice caps and we as a species live through them. Earth also has periods of warm times. We as a species live through them as well.

And our cultural development is markedly irregular. Look at the world in which we live in. People can’t live without their electronics. Ha. Plenty of people live without electronics. We call them ‘primitive’ or ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘backward’ or ‘uncivilized’ or any number of disparaging things. Yet they are identical in form and in brain function to us ‘privileged’ people. They live their lives just as we do, from one day to the next.

Now we’re going to play ‘What If’.

What if something drastic happened and all of our electronics went on the blink at the same time?

What if whatever happened back then happened again? How much of our ‘civilization’ would remain? Hmm? Great heat can melt stone. It can incinerate to ashes every last thing we’ve built in the course of the last ten thousand years. It can obliterate entire continents and all that dwell thereon. Vast amounts of moving water can and do erase and rearrange landscapes on a massive scale, pulverizing anything that gets in its way, just like it does in its frozen form only a lot faster. Don’t think it’s ever happened and couldn’t possibly happen again even if it did once?

See, this is how come most of our local folk look at me sideways a lot of the time. I write ‘What If’ stuff.

What if back in the day the curious folk, the intrepid folk, the folk who wanted to push that envelope … what if they, as in our own history if you recall, weren’t exactly paid attention to by the folk who happened to like things the way they were?

What if they pooled their resources and headed off to a part of the world where they could do their thing without any help, or hindrance, from the rest of humankind?

What if, self-isolated for thousands of years in their own little niche, they used those thousands of years pretty much like we’ve used the last decades, centuries, and millennia?

What if they plopped themselves down smack in the middle of a huge continent, a place nobody really even knew about let alone wanted to go to?

With nobody to tell them otherwise it might not have crossed their minds that there were things they ‘couldn’t possibly’ do.

Such a culture wouldn’t have to be necessarily ‘secretive’ – if nobody cares to come looking to see what you might be up to you wouldn’t bother hiding for heaven’s sake. You’d just do what you do.

Their isolation might have lasted for a lot of millennia. Given our own recent advances, try to wrap your mind around what might develop in the course of the next say forty or fifty thousand years. The world in which they lived in had been stable for a hundred thousand years before the glaciers started to retreat and things started changing. The world in which we live in is apparently on the cusp of another change. Let’s hope it isn’t as drastic as that last one.

All the moaning and groaning and hands in the air drama in the world isn’t going to make the least little bit of difference. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen.

Fictionally speaking, back in the day they had teams whose job it was to take care of a lot of the issues of Earth that were of potential concern to humankind. They controlled the ice caps as best they could. They monitored and made adjustments when Earth’s crust became restless. They capped or vented volcanos. But they only did what they had to do when they had to do it. They weren’t all about controlling Earth herself. They also had teams up there in the skies to nudge space objects away from Earth’s orbit and her atmosphere.

Fictionally speaking, one guy’s attempt to nudge an enormous asteroid didn’t quite turn out to be just another day’s work for him. It was more fragile than anticipated and his nudge fractured it instead of redirecting it.

That’s all it took.

Huge chunks and all the rest of the debris from that big rock hit the atmosphere of Earth and exploded from hell to breakfast. Because at the time Earth was lined up just right in the solar system (just like it is now, come to think of it) Jupiter was out of alignment to shield her. But she had those honkin’ big sheets of ice in her northern hemisphere, the one most vulnerable at the time (just like now, come to think of it). They were in retreat but going almighty slow. They offered what protection they could but when those huge chunks of rock ignited the glaciers took the brunt of the hits. Other chunks hit elsewhere as all that debris nailed the hell out of the northern hemisphere and most especially North America. The ice took the biggest whomp but those other pieces of debris were just as lethal.

The poor guy who started the whole thing didn’t have time to feel bad about it. He was incinerated before his brain could form the thought, ‘Oops.’

So Earth had to cope with the consequences and it took a good thousand years for her to stop reeling from that impact.

On the other hand, if that guy hadn’t been up there doing his job, that massive thing could have hit Earth’s atmosphere in one big lump instead of fracturing ahead of time. Poor Earth might have been knocked for a major loop, clear out of her regular orbit. And then what?

‘Impossible’ you say?

Well, I write fiction and don’t really find the word ‘impossible’ all that intimidating.