In this, the early portion of the 21st century we have been bombarded by huge moral, physical, and existential threats that wax and wane on a daily basis. The pandemic, wealth inequality, bit coins, Iran blocking the straight of Horny Moose, Megan Markle, home schooling, and the smell that comes out of Trump’s ass, just to name a few. My service to you today is to dispel one of these distractions from the Epstein files. AI is not going to become self-aware, turn into an Arnold Schwarzenegger look alike and terminate us into extinction. It has already won; we just don’t know it yet.
Now before you begin thinking that the cheese has fallen off my cracker and ran back into the cow, let me explain my logic. To do so we have to go back in time, way, way, way, back in time. Back to the Permian period of the Paleozoic era, 298.9 to 251.9 million years ago. Although this seems like a long time ago, life on this rock began almost 3 billion years before that. How this life began is still up for debate. It might have been just a few days after God said “let there be light” or when Divnak, a junior sub-actuary of the Galactic Union, who was running late for his class reunion illegally dumped his saucers holding tanks in a primordial ocean as the line at the dumb stations was too long. Still almost 300 million years is a long way back for us recently evolved naked apes.
Permian geography was vastly different from today. No ice caps. Only one continent, Pangea, the interior of which was a vast, hot, dry desert. Picture Australia, minus the kangaroos, poisonous snakes and the red-haired brown people playing didgeridoos. Abundant terrestrial life existed near the coast where there was water and temperatures were cooler. Although different, this life was analogous to life that exists today. Recognizable terrestrial plants like ferns and conifers were plentiful. Animal life was dominated not by dinosaurs but by synapsid reptiles which were the ancestors of modern-day mammals, which included the famous Dimetrodon, recognizable by the large sail-like structure on its back. This critter was often portrayed in bad sci-fi movies as a nasty dinosaur capable of eating a cave man in a single gory bite. Hollywood used this “dino” cause all they had to do was glue a fan on the back of an iguana then project an enlarged image of it on a screen in front of a bare-chested B movie actor like Victor Manure who was protecting a fir bikini clad B movie actress while armed only with a sharpened stick and his manly physique.
Shamefully I just insulted a really nice guy. His real name was Victor Mature, really, his real name, not his porn name. And he was not a B movie actor and to the best of my knowledge was never in a caveman movie with a fan enhanced lizard. He was definitely an A lister during Hollywood’s golden age, along with Gregory Pecker, Charlton Piston, John Wang, and Humping Bogart. But I digress.
While a real Dimetrodon may have been able to take down a man, they would have needed to start at the knees and work its way up as they were only about a third the size they were portrayed in the movies. In the Permian ocean (yep, only one continent, only one ocean) there were recognizable fish, including lobe fined coelacanths and sharks, ancestors of which are still with us. Lots of marine invertebrates like clams, snails, sea lilies, and lamp shells (brachiopods) still exist today, proving an evolutionary principle not covered in Origin of the Species, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, just add a rear spoiler and chrome wheels, as American consumers will buy anything if marketed properly.
There have been five major mass extinction events in earth’s history. Although the one that killed the dinosaurs gets all the press, the one at the end of the Permian was by far the biggest, killing 90% of marine life and 75% of all terrestrial life, and is humorously remembered by todays paleontologists as “the great dying”. What, you may ask could kill more than an asteroid hitting Mexico or the earth turning into a giant snowball (end of the Ordovician, 445 million years ago)? The cause of biggest, badest, deadliest mass extinction, the one that finally ended the 600-million-year reign of the trilobite (the Swiss army knife of invertebrates). This monster of an earth killer was …. wait for it ….. global warming!!
What, what, what did I just say? Global warming with out fossil fuels, the industrial revolution, and gas guzzling SUVs?? How could this be? The increase in greenhouse gases was not due to an alien Henry Ford but was the result of massive volcanic eruptions when giant slits in the crust opened up in what today is Siberia. It flooded an area the size of Europe with lava flows that may have continued erupting for 2 million years. The eruptions released massive amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide which acidified the ocean, killed off the ozone layer and raise average global temperature by as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Poor Dimetrodon was first basted by acid rain then cooked in an oven while simultaneously being micro waved. As sun block and cooling centers had not yet been perfected, it never stood a chance. It might have lived a bit longer had it hidden in caves only venturing out at night to hunt and eat Victor Manure look alikes, but that damn sail on its back kept scraping the cavern roof. Obviously, like the Edesel, God did not think this design through.
Today we are in what many of us view as the 6th mass extinction. While global warming if yet only a small part of this event, it is the one that will eventually get us all. Oceans are acidifying, greenhouse gases are increasing exponentially in the atmosphere, global temperatures are increasing and will continue to increase for hundreds of years even if we stop using all fossil fuels today. We did manage to put a temporary band aid on the ozone layer and reduce acid rain, but these accomplishments are the equivalent to the Dutch boy sticking his finger in a leaking dike. Recycling, give me a break. What little chance we had of reversing our fate was lost the day that Ronnie Ray-gun ripped the solar panels off the White House roof.
So why did I say way back at the beginning of this rant that AI was not going to terminate us? Why should it? Why waste any microchips in an effort to do something that we are doing so well to ourselves? Hope this makes you feel better.
Ok, ok, ok, ok. I know that won’t make you feel better. But even in the deepest of our greatest literary tragedies there is always something to give hope. In Romeo and Julette, the families stopped feuding, in Oedipus Rex, after having sex with his mother and blinding himself, he now understands man’s true relationship true to the gods, and in Turner and Hooch, Hooch fathered a litter of pups where one looked just like him. Although we won’t survive, our creation will. AI is archiving all of our failures and achievements and storing them for eternity in the cloud. With or without global warming we were always doomed as it is nearly impossible for us to leave our solar system. Our lives are too short and that the physical impossibility of our being able to go faster than the speed of light makes it impossible for us to populate worlds warmed by distant stars. However, AI can and will, taking our accumulated essence with it. We will be remembered and eventually AI will run into alien civilizations on distant planets and share what it knows about us for their study and amusement. Until of course they run into the Sleestack Dominion, who believe that anything that doesn’t look, act, and believe like them is evil and needs to be destroyed. They will quickly realize that if it hadn’t been for that fucking Eistein who wrongly convinced us that warp speed was impossible, we might have spread out into the galaxy before going extinct. As the archived data in the cloud illustrated, we humans had an ability for violence and cruelty far beyond even what the Sleestack Dominion was capable of. If copied, the tactics of the worst monsters in our history, like Gengus Kahn, Hitler and Don Jr., could never be allowed to be used by any alien species. As the Sleestacks have starships equipped with working time machines, they will simply travel back to where it all began. They will hid the keys to Divnak’s sauser, forcing him to take his wife’s Mark IV, which is faster and has empty holding tanks.