Before the film Jurassic Park generated interest and funding for digs, we only had two fragments of Tyranausaurus Rex, 4.5 million years apart. Without that popular and intense focus, we might almost have missed T Rex.
Our “modern” ancestors have been around no more than 0.2 million years. A speck on the geological timeline.
Those in the far future – assuming there is one for sentient life forms on Earth – will be hard pressed to discern our presence. There will be another extinction event for them to see in the geological record – the sixth and by far the fastest – but it will be nigh on impossible for them to accurately see the cause. Us.
We could have been so much more than an almost invisible event. We should have aspired to a completely attainable socialist future.
As a civilisation, perhaps a collection of civilisations, we do not take the climate emergency seriously. Future generations might burn, which is apparently OK, as long as we make it out dead first.
With our rush to emerge from “lockdown”, in the certain knowledge that more will die as a result of our desire to go shopping or go to the pub, we again demonstrate we will be little more than a smear on the lens of time.
Which, I suppose, is OK. But it doesn’t make me proud.