Foreigners

You are a comet. You are new at this whole comet thing, but in your travels you come across an average star holding nine planets in orbit. Eventually you arrive to a quaint little blue planet and you notice something remarkable. The previous planets you have seen have been beautiful, but they have been desolate, cold, and lifeless. This blue one falls into none of those categories.

You are stunned as you see vast oceans, lush forests, expansive deserts, and majestic mountain ranges. You marvel at herds of hulking elephants thundering below graceful flocks of birds. You are drawn to the swift creatures of the sea and the powerful beasts of the plains. This planet is alive.

Then you notice something quite peculiar. On this planet also resides animal-like creatures, but they behave quite differently than the rest of the planet's life. They know how to build buildings, drive cars, and they spend a lot of their time communicating about what seems to be nothing. All of the other life you have seen to this point seems content with their environment, but these animals are different. They seem to have some sort of control over their natural habitat and can manipulate their surroundings. Now you wonder, how can this happen?

You fly your comet self closer to the planet and come across some strange conversations. You hear some of these creatures talking of "When we evolved from animals" and other things of that sort. You become confused. You realize that these creatures are similar to many creatures of this planet in biological makeup, but your observations made them remarkably different than the rest of the animals.

Coming back to real life, I think this comet was onto something. If you take a hard look at nature around us, we share many traits with our fellow inhabitants of earth. On a rough level, we share bodily functions and methods of mobility with most animals on this planet. But as the comet noticed, any observations after that point place us humans as quite foreign to the world around us.

I freely admit I am no scientist, but have you noticed that most natural cycles occur with the intent of preserving nature itself? Photosysntesis is a good example. A plant consumes carbon dioxide, makes oxygen, then animals and people breath oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. On the same note, ecosystems have elaborate food webs and food chains that keep the ecosystem going.

Now when humans enter the picture, everything changes. Through the rise and fall of civilizations, humans have destroyed, modified, and utilized the natural environments around them. We cultivate crops, clear forests, and shape landscapes to meet our needs. That does not sound very natural at all. It sounds alien to nature's self-preserving goals. So, this brings us to the comet's dilemma: If man's goals are detrimental to nature's goals, then did man really come from nature? More specifically, if man seems a foreigner to this earth, then how could he evolve from it?

This leads us to the next questions: If man did not evolve, then was he created? And if he was created, where did this "alienness" come from?

These will be explored in future posts =D