Homogeneous World

Heck, I won't even bring up the amount of species we're killing off each and every day with consumption of resources, toxic despoilment, or just out and out killing.

Oh no... there's enough little things we're doing that'll allow Mother Nature to kill off most of the species all on her own.

For all the time that life has thrived on this festering green ball we call home, there's been an grand vastness of space for evolution to play with. Every trick in the book could be explored here and there; boundless creativity in every haphazard design, each in its own safe sandbox.

And not just creative internal designs of creatures -- there's also the masterful touch found in the constant give and take of each species with every other species in its environment. Natural upheaval and change occurred on a pace slow enough that ecosystems had a chance to reach stability (or bust, and in turn there'd be time for replacement, again and again, until a stable ecosystem was grounded).

Even when two ecosystems were brought into decimating contact with each other, one subsuming the other (in the best of cases) -- the loss was only one small system. This loss was covered in the grand scheme of things when some other system somewhere was sundered in two (maybe not at the same moment, but we're talking averages here on a geological scale).

But now welcome the humans. No... skip that. The humans aren't really a problem. They're edible, they're fine breeding grounds for viruses and all sorts of parasitic infections. No... blame their transportation system. Just look at what they import on a casual whim. Take a gander at what happened to Australia with the rabbit. Heck - sometimes this even happens intentionally (can anyone tell me that the Eucalyptus was a win for California?)

Even worse is what we import unintentionally -- just look at how quickly any modern cold can cover the entire world with the ease of travel we allow ourselves access to. There is no section of the globe we can't reach, and there's very little of it we don't currently occupy. And as the years go on, we're certainly going to clear out any space we need to make more homes for ourselves.

But the worst is all the little ways in which we don't even notice we're introducing new ecosystems together. Sure we all know that rats and other unwanted vermin accompany cargo of all sorts across the waters... but it was only recently that some environmentalist tried to raise holy heck when they noticed that coral sea life was surviving and cross colonizing by hoping a ride in the ballast of various ocean going cargo ships -- there still haven't been any strict restrictions put in place to stop this.

And now, no we're finding out that the accumulation of free floating plastic garbage in the oceans is allowing all manner of creatures to cross the globe in record time. We don't even have to be present anymore to allow cross contamination to occur... and the pace is just going to pick up with every decade.

Someday, certainly not in my lifetime, but someday very soon geologicly speaking, there will only be one world ecosystem -- with its own limited biosystem. Humans will support themselves, and all their pet creatures... but the rest of the pantheon will be composed of those that can live off of humans, or relate to those parasites in some symbiotic relationship.

And that's going to be one poor world.