Insect die offs really scare me, so many fruits and plants are pollinated by them, or things just up the food chain from them. Then I just can’t help imagining a chain of collapse from there.

I think humans will be the last living things to go unless we engineer our own extinction early.

We have maintained huge megafauna populations though, who are ready and able to take over the moment we go. Cows, sheep, and yes, horses like shown in the comic, are prime examples. We’re also doing a damn good job of killing all their natural predators, namely wolves and big cats.

Horses have actually become an invasive species in some parts of the Americas and driving out native large herbivores. Ever heard of American wild horses? They’re technically “feral horses” because they did not exist in this hemisphere before Europeans came.

I’ve thought about that and to me it makes it worse. We have glimmers of knowing better, of doing the right thing, just enough to demonstrate that we *can, * but 99 times out of 100 we don’t.

You can’t get angry at a lion for following it’s genetic programming, it doesn’t have the capacity for introspection about its nature. Its sentient, but not sapient. We can know better, with our cognitive abilities combined with tools of historical recording most of us do know better, but when presented the chance to take either our share of the pie with our brothers and sisters, or to take the whole pie and leave them hungry, we pick the latter like clockwork.

The tragedy is knowing that we have the capacity to be a great people that accomplishes wonders together, but we still choose to fight one another for the biggest banana pile like impulsive beasts almost every time throughout recorded history. We refuse to learn. We refuse to heed the lessons of history for longer than a single generation. We can glimpse enlightenment, but choose the easy dopamine hit. It’s maddening.