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.
