It’s Tuesday morning around 11am. A beautiful day, cold and crisp without being bitter, and one I should be out enjoying except that I’m sharing troubling thoughts with the vast emptiness of the Internet. Hopefully someone will read, listen, and take heed…otherwise I believe we richly deserve what’s coming to us. Yesterday while on a day trip to Kingman for Whataburger and Cracker Barrel (our first time), during our food-burning break between lunch and dinner, we found a tiny movie theatre and watched The Day the Earth Stood Still. Keanu Reeves makes an excellent semi-humanoid alien, by the way. At the end of it I felt an overwhelming sadness and something akin to righteous defeat. For those of you who don’t leave the house or didn’t catch the original, I’ll give you a quick rundown: Aliens come to Earth to save it from us because Earth is one of a small handful of life-supporting planets in the solar system. The many “alien” races cannot 
afford to let a planet such as this die to due to one inhabitant species (that would be us) and plan to cleanse the planet of us, hence giving Earth a chance to recover and survive. If you think about it, we as humans are the one species on Earth not tied to any ecosystem. For example: Alaskan fishermen over fish herring, which in turn starves sea lions, lowering their numbers, which in turn affects the food supply for killer whales and sharks. Think about it - if we’re not here, nothing dies because of it. In fact, more things would flourish. Bluntly, we are unnecessary.
Aside from this realization, which is only partially responsible for my sadness, there was a line in the movie that stated: “Only when we’re on the brink of destruction will we change”. That may not be a direct quote, but you get the hint. If you ever ask yourself questions about why we, as the United States or the world, don’t do certain things that would actually help the planet and ultimately save us – there’s your answer. All of it, as far as I can tell, is driven by the Almighty Dollar. There’s no money in going green. God forbid some oilman doesn’t make X hundreds of millions in profits every year.
I think we have it coming. I think if aliens have visited here, they’ve left feeling dirty and disgusted, and if they’re visiting in the future they’ll all agree we should be exterminated for being destructive and having no purpose. I’m currently ashamed to be human. We’re a sorry lot hell-bent on greed and one-upping each other. We think because we can reason and talk that we’re better than any other living creature and should therefore have the right to dominate and kill everything. We’re despicable.
The alien was right – it’s not our planet.
afford to let a planet such as this die to due to one inhabitant species (that would be us) and plan to cleanse the planet of us, hence giving Earth a chance to recover and survive. If you think about it, we as humans are the one species on Earth not tied to any ecosystem. For example: Alaskan fishermen over fish herring, which in turn starves sea lions, lowering their numbers, which in turn affects the food supply for killer whales and sharks. Think about it - if we’re not here, nothing dies because of it. In fact, more things would flourish. Bluntly, we are unnecessary.Aside from this realization, which is only partially responsible for my sadness, there was a line in the movie that stated: “Only when we’re on the brink of destruction will we change”. That may not be a direct quote, but you get the hint. If you ever ask yourself questions about why we, as the United States or the world, don’t do certain things that would actually help the planet and ultimately save us – there’s your answer. All of it, as far as I can tell, is driven by the Almighty Dollar. There’s no money in going green. God forbid some oilman doesn’t make X hundreds of millions in profits every year.
I think we have it coming. I think if aliens have visited here, they’ve left feeling dirty and disgusted, and if they’re visiting in the future they’ll all agree we should be exterminated for being destructive and having no purpose. I’m currently ashamed to be human. We’re a sorry lot hell-bent on greed and one-upping each other. We think because we can reason and talk that we’re better than any other living creature and should therefore have the right to dominate and kill everything. We’re despicable.
The alien was right – it’s not our planet.
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