#HTE

Are Human Beings Just Intelligent Bacteria?

Following the Tools & Craft reference to Burning Man, I rewatched this time-lapse videos shot there a few years ago:

I remember finding this video pretty when I first viewed it, but something about it bothered me this time around. The perfect semicircle of the “town” taking shape atop the more organic canvas of the sand, interrupted by little dust storms, didn’t seem beautiful to me; instead it seemed almost…grotesque. As the lasers kicked in and the illuminated vehicles began moving back and forth, we humans look, as we always do from afar and in fast motion, insectoid.

The entire scene reminded me of a Joe Rogan rant from years ago:

I think human beings are just a very complicated form of bacteria. I think if you looked at the earth as a living organism, and who’s to say that it’s not some sort of super organism? It’s certainly a host for life, and we’re considered a living organism, and we’re a host for life. There’s more [e. coli] living inside our gut than there have ever been humans on this earth. There’s bacteria constantly around you, and your body is fighting off that bacteria, until your body grows old and dies, and then it doesn’t fight anymore. That bacteria just eats your body. That’s what its there for.

If you looked at the Earth as a living organism as you’re flying into L.A and as you’re passing all these beautiful mountains, and you see the ocean ahead, and it all looks so natural and beautiful, and then you see L.A. and you think, well, what the fuck is that? It’s a growth, that’s cancer. Its big, its brown, it stinks, smoke’s coming out of it, and it gets bigger every year. And it doesn’t matter what you do, its going to keep going, you could knock it down with a hurricane and it just rebuilds. Light it on fire, it rebuilds.

I think if you were an intelligent life-form from another planet, you wouldn’t see individual people, you wouldn’t see housekeepers and limo drivers, and stand up comedians. You wouldn’t see that, you would see mold on a sandwich.

I think if you look at us subjectively and the way we’ve always been, it doesn’t matter how much access to info we have, it doesn’t matter how much technological innovation we have, we’re always going to destroy the Earth, ‘cos I think, one way or another, that’s what we’re supposed to do.

That’s our purpose here on earth. We are here to fuck shit up. I think we’re here to eat the sandwich.

Redditor Nesshie91 provided the above transcription in a thread there. The subsequent discussion is illuminating, touching on everything from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot to a 1934 scientific paper by Russian biologist Georgii Frantsevich Gause called “The Struggle for Existence,” which explains what happens when bacteria reaches its limits.

If the theory above strikes a chord in you, the thread is worth the read and it’s right here.