Are we the Aliens?
Should we be exterminated?
By George Bishop
When you look at the demographics of our progress from a life swinging from branch to branch to our current almost entirely sedentary occupation of the Earth, you have to wonder whether Charles Darwin did indeed get it all wrong.
Well, maybe some of it. Darwinism can explain much of what we see around us. We can watch animals adapting and mutating to fit their environment. We can see them learning and adopting new skills. We can watch them adapting to the man made environment which has almost strangled them in concrete and steel. Those that cannot adapt….become extinct, or have to be moved to reservations where they can be artificially supported and cosseted in order to salve our consciences at the loss of their habitat and our guilt for their potential demise.
There are just too many humans surviving to adulthood and producing too many children, at a rate the Earth cannot support for ever, indeed not even for too much longer! We need a solution, but we also need to understand how this anomaly came about.
The easiest solution is for us to emigrate to other Earths, just as the colonists of old did with the new world and Africa when their continent began to seem too crowded. Colonies on Mars or the Moon may seem like the answer, but they would only provide temporary accommodation. Once we have reached Mars or the Moon, it might act as a relief valve for the overcrowding on Earth, but the only permanent solution is to transplant a colony of a million or so on each Earth-like planet we can find until such time as we have reached equilibrium on our overcrowded planet.
Once we have achieved that we need to look at how we got to this position and ensure that it does not occur again. If we could stabilize Earths population at, say ten million for the sake of argument, birth control would take care of our numbers and the animals who really are more likely to belong here, can re-inherit their rightful place in the ecology of Planet Earth. Euthanasia is quicker and cheaper but not likely to be popular with the general public!
Man was not the only human species on this planet, but he has been the most successful and has been able to outwit, outhunt and outbreed all of the other species. Man was co-existent with many of them and there must have been direct confrontation on many occasions. But, just how did we become pre-eminent? What made us smarter than the rest? For sure we weren’t the strongest. There is even doubt as to whether we were indeed the smartest. Something got us out of the trees. Possibly a climatic change where we were forced to move through open prairie in search of food and the next tree.
But that animal was of the “family” of man, not Homo sapiens himself. Humanoids of several descriptions set out from Africa, climbing out of the trees and taking up a nomadic lifestyle which allowed them to explore the world. Probably working their way along the beaches, living off shellfish, fish and berries. Their forays inland would have been severely limited apart from a few expeditions up rivers to live off the game that came for water. Once the beaches became crowded the pressure to explore inland would begin. Following herds of prey, they began the population of the Earth’s hinterland.
One of the species, and it is by no means certain which, began to prey upon the others. Either directly, or by competition for prey. This species was combative and smart. Maybe they were also lucky, but I think they tended to make their own luck!
What was the difference, just where did this increase in intelligence and adaptability come from? Homo sapiens is patently unfit to adapt to the conditions they faced. His virtually hairless skin is hardly designed to suit the rigours of an ice-age, yet somehow they learned to wear the skin of their prey and to weave cloth from vegetation. Darwinism would be hard put to explain that! Man is virtually the only animal to create clothing to enable him to utilise areas which are not conducive to life. Many animals adopt covering for disguise, protection or display, but they still stay in the same area, only moving along zones of a similar temperature.
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