Humbling Mankind: The Transit of Venus

The evolutionary history of mankind can be summed up as stopping the use of our opposable thumbs to make farting noises with our armpits and masturbating to building incredible feats of architecture, machinery, and putting the brain hard to work in decoding the ultimate lock in understanding the genetic code. And of course, figuring out more clever ways to masturbate. So, as a species we’ve come a long way and while the majority of us cannot fight a bear with our bare hands, we can try and think of ways to outsmart the grizzly. We’re possibly the smartest species on earth, and quite possibly one of the smartest species in the galaxy. And being the smartest on the planet has made us a little cocky, a bit too big for our britches. We may be bright- but we’re the smart kid that no one likes on the playground. We’re kind of snobbish and a little bit of a dick. All the other animals are staring at us like “We just want to have fun” and then we reply by shooting them in the face and making a fur coat out of their bodies. That was the environmentalist coming out in me. Most scientist research in aim to help, and to understand but after they make their ground breaking discovery there is always someone not that far behind looking to take advantage of it. Like cashing in on bringing back the deceased pet business.

Danielle Tarrantolla, possibly one of the most Guido sounding names I have very typed, paid nearly $50,000 dollars to have her dog Trouble cloned. The woman was obsessed with her dog, painting a mural on her wall in the deceased pooches name, and even having an entire bedspread created for him, and was looking for any way to keep her dog alive. Enter the lab in South Korea that commercially clones deceased pets. Tarrantolla was able to watch as Double Trouble was born and became one of seven cloned pets within the United States.  While cloning is a relatively new technology with extreme kinks to be worked out, the real fear and criticism is, when do people stop paying to clone their childhood pets and start cloning themselves?  Tarantolla was just a regular woman from Staten Island (I assume with a name like that) and was able to pay for one. I shudder at the thought of Donald Trump doing the same, but instead of his pet it’s him. And his unpleasant hair.

While we may be fifty years before that occurs as a possibility it is still an uneasy feeling. Not only would it be Donald Trump like figures to clone themselves, but dictators, corrupt politicians, Paula Deen. It calls into philosophical and moral elements I am not tired or stoned enough to even comprehend. When I first heard about Tarantolla and Double Trouble, it worried me, I wondered what we couldn’t do a as a species, did we have too much power and not enough discipline? And then weathermen, of all people subdued my fears, for a little while at least.

Last week on June 6, 2012 Venus, that little minx of a planet she is, passed in front of the sun and her shadow could be seen with the aid of some telescopes. This phenomenon is not going to occur, it will not occur for another hundred and five years and so for all those people (well, all those meteorologists and astrologists) that wished to see this phenomena would most likely never be able to again.  And from this I remember there is at this moment, an infinite amount of possibilities for the future, an infinite amount of knowledge to learn. Sure we can make rain, we can level entire cities, clone pets, but we can’t change a planet’s orbit and there are most likely a million more events that we cannot control.

Human beings may be the smartest species on earth, possibly this galaxy, but in the grand scheme of things, in the great big plan that the universe may have, we really aren’t any better than a seven year old with some crayons.  And as a person who tends to get a little nervous about the future of the planet, I think to how there is still so much more that we have left to learn about the world. Except masturbating, as a species I think we pretty much have perfected it.

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