The Great Simplification Started About 75k Years Ago
7 It just hasn’t included us moderns, the metastatic cause, yet
Modern humans can claim to be clever apes as cleverness in serving the expansionist growth hegemon is selected for (reinforced until it can’t be). A remorseless pursuit of and frequent achievement of short-term self interest is celebrated, longed for.
When modernity fails to persist, when we are in a race to the bottom of a centuries long downslope, the last house of cards to fall will be our belief in the necessary primacy of the modern human enterprise, our belief in metastatic modernity.
The consensus storytellers will stumble and fall into silence (or be silenced). Severing a non-viable form of civilization is not clever, or rather too clever by half and not nearly smart enough to persist. Only when the modern defining universal (Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator’s ability to tell stories and believe in them) faulters, may some modern humans have a come to Gaia moment.
The most intelligent pundits will stop telling stories about the world that they believe in or would want anyone else to believe, stories about the world that are mis-taken for the world. Some few will know themselves for the first time, and stand down from their hubris heights. Prattling primates tell no true stories as no story about the world is the what’s out there. Only a silent mind can listen. To think is to listen. Listen to the Gaian system to end the condition of being modern.
That Homo sapiens sapiens var. narrator is lethal to almost all taxons is not well known or taught. If mentioned, no one who expects to be paid (to serve the necessary primacy of the human enterprise) will mention what is unthinkable to modern humans (that they are the problematique). If you are or soon become a failed modern human, reality can then stand clear before your pug-nosed face (if seen by eyes unglazed by prattle — ideology).
Understanding the last 12k years of human history is not possible apart from the last 13.8 billion years of natural history, not the last 4 billion years of life on Earth, or the last seven million years of Hominina, or the last 75k years of the expansionist form of human.
The last 30 thousand years is not remotely “The Dawn of Everything” (it is just all that modern humans can collectively interest themselves in provided the narrative is remorselessly modern human centric).
Animal Biomass vs Humans
In the 21st Century humans amount to 0.001% of Earth’s biomass, up from 0.00008% 10,000 years ago.
So plants, primary producers that almost all other surface life depends on, are 8,400 times more massive than humans even though we have reduced the plant biomass (via deforestation/agriculture) by 50% in celebration of the Anthropocene era climaxing in the 21st century.
Humans, about 7 percent of all vertebrate biomass, are one species; livestock are a few species, mostly mammals, and all the other taxa are many (about 10 million) species.
While only 30 percent of all birds are currently wild, 10,000 years ago there were 25 times more wild birds than humans by weight. Now, for a time, there are 30 times more humans than wild birds by weight. These numbers will change in the near future (as measured in geological/ecolate time). In just a few millennia human biomass has increased 750 fold.
Hu-mans (modern HUbris-MAN Swarm) have also reduced the biomass of wild mammals by 83 percent although the overall biomass of mammals has increased over fourfold (414%), proof that hu-mans are far superior (or not) to all primatives. Some (but not all) wild mammals that do not go extinct will end up in zoos to amuse, and will still be called ‘wild’ as the zoos will become evermore natural looking. You can’t stop progress (but Nature can).
Source: PNAS. For more graphics: The Guardian. Important details in the Appendix.
“If all of the approximately 5,000 mammal species on the planet had an equal share of mammal biomass, the human population would number 4 million. This gives a crude sense for the present degree of human imbalance (2,000 times the equipartition number). Ten thousand years ago, humans were indeed close to an equal share of mammal biomass, by species.” — Tom Murphy
PS: If modern humans persist, they will view the Milky Way as a galaxy for the taking, and having assimilated such life on Earth as they value, will no longer be a threat to life on Earth (but will be to any life in the Milky Way, the first of trillions of galaxies for the taking by zero-order humanists who will call themselves Borg).