Across the Universe
“When I got up to space, I looked at the blackness of space. There were no dazzling lights. It was just palpable blackness. I believed I saw death. And then I looked back at the Earth. Having read a lot of things about the evolution of Earth over 5 billion years and how all the beauty of nature has evolved, I thought about how we’re killing everything.”
William Shatner
Willaim Shatner of Star Trek fame, was moved to tears on landing back on earth from his short space flight this year on Blue Origin, courtesy of Jeff Bezos. It seems that it often takes a dramatic dislocation like this in order to perceive freshly, since we are all so embedded in our habitual societal frames of reference.
To elaborate on the value of a fresh view, let’s imagine a party of alien beings from another galaxy paying an unobtrusive visit to Earth in order to check up on the development of life on this outlying planet. And let’s suppose these aliens to be from a more mature civilisation, peaceable, technologically advanced, with a much deeper understanding of the unitary entangled nature of life; beings who perceive life as a profoundly interdependent sacred process; having long shed notions of matter being inert, and knowing that life is value which has taken physical form. These visitors might well intuitively think like an ecosystem rather than as individuals.
On arrival they couldn’t help but notice and be concerned by how a single dominant life form on this planet – a bipedal mammalian species – was in effect destroying the life support systems of their only home, and the home of millions of other species they share their planet with. And they seemed intent on accelerating this damage, whether due to ignorance or greed, despite warnings from some members of its own species.
Yet perhaps, although very disquieting, this wasn’t brand new information to our visitors, because they had been monitoring the harmful changes in the earth’s atmosphere from afar, and knew that this was induced by actions of the dominant planetary species.
But another aspect of conditions on this planet would have been shocking and incomprehensible to our intergalactic outsiders. And that’s namely: how one animal species – this bipedal primate known as a human being – had enslaved certain other animal species, often keeping them in vast overcrowded prison factories to be fattened up quickly to be killed and eaten.
Our visiting aliens, being highly developed beings, were able to easily access all the data kept by these human beings. They learned that worldwide, an astounding 70 billion of so-called farm animals were now reared solely for these human animals to eat as food each year and that two in three farm animals in the world were now “factory farmed”. They learned that factory farms were a form of intensive agriculture focused on raising animals (which were also referred to by the term “livestock”) for food. Vast numbers of animals were raised to be slaughtered in overcrowded indoor spaces for the duration of their too-short lives in inhumane conditions. In the highest region of consumption, termed the United States of America, (an incongruous title, our aliens thought, given this region’s evident disunity), 99% of farm animals were raised on factory farms. These facilities seemed to our visitors, eerily reminiscent of the concentration camps they had learned about in the recent historical timeline of homo sapiens.
Our aliens were frankly horrified to see how this one dominant primate had cruelly enslaved some of their fellow beings without dignity nor respect for their existence. In contrast, our aliens took it as a universal given that every sentient being has both the desire and the right to live.
Surveying planet earth, our visitors found that the animals imprisoned in factory farms now comprised the bulk of all creatures on planet earth and that humans had killed off much of the remaining fauna, small or large, by overhunting or destroying their natural habitats. Even the myriad small creatures – the insects – had recently suffered their own apocalypse as a result of poisoning by human-sprayed pesticides.
The aliens considered this woeful predicament prevailing on this previously abundantly biodiverse planet. In order to feed the poor captives of these factory farms, more natural forest had to be cut down to be planted with crops to feed the imprisoned animals; and the effluent from these mega farms was poisoning the waters and the atmosphere. There were human beings arguing for the cessation of this way of life and showing how a plant based diet was far less cruel, much more efficient in land use, in conserving wild places, and far less polluting, and healthier too, but this was still a fringe, though growing movement.
Our aliens wondered why these humans found such a bizarre state of affairs acceptable, when they generally were kind to their own families and often kept certain animals as ‘pets’, lavishing love on these particular beings, while seemingly indifferent to the cold slaughter in full swing just out of sight. Humans seemed to be so addicted to the taste and familiarity of their chosen types of flesh that they wouldn’t contemplate forgoing it or even cutting down consumption, even though their medical experts advocated a largely plant based diet for health reasons. It seemed that these humans were intransigently habitual and almost psychologically hard wired to not see the reality and consequences of their way of life. Our aliens couldn’t help but notice the parallels with how the planetary leaders of the humans had declared a climate emergency and yet most humans carried on largely regardless.
Yet our extraterrestrials also noted that not all hominids lived in this way, and in some areas of the globe, the humans were treated almost as badly as their fellow animal species.
Some humans in certain regions consumed the vast majority of resources and other animals and hoarded great wealth, while in other parts of this globe, humans went hungry and were homeless; so it wasn’t simply all humans united together against all other species. And there were also still places where groups of human beings had always lived in relative harmony with their environment and with their fellow beings of all species. Yes, these humans sometimes needed to take life in order that they might also live, yet it was done in a spirit of gratitude and reverence. And all life was seen as kith and kin.
Bound by an intergalactic directive of non-interference with indigenous life forms, our aliens would not directly intervene. Instead, they put a marker beacon around the planet which would be undetectable by the relatively primitive human technology; this would broadcast a message for space voyagers; a warning to give this planet a wide berth due to it being currently dangerously immature and possessing technology and weaponry beyond its level of wisdom.
Our visitors had monitored this planet on occasion for a long time, and knew there had been a number of mass extinctions in its history. Yet for all their wisdom, the aliens couldn’t predict the future on planet earth. Knowing that humans had precipitated the start of this latest sixth mass extinction, very possibly there might unfold a catastrophic loss of life on a par with the previous mass extinctions.
But our extraterrestrials could foresee another possibility if sanity prevailed and the worst of the collapses could be averted. In such a future, there might be young humans perhaps asking their grandparents about what it was like in those ecocidal days, thankfully narrowly averted. And maybe people were now no longer carnists, with much of the earth’s land consequently freed up from use for animal agriculture, and able to naturally regenerate, restoring ecological health and biodiversity.
“Granddad, did people really keep fellow animals captive in concentration camps and then kill and eat them?!” “Surely you didn’t eat your kith and kin too, did you?”
