My Under-Achieving Ancestors

Sure lets blame the microbes!

Here's an article about how sulfur-loving microbes may have stinted complex life on Early Earth.

I think its rather mean of scientists to blame sulfur loving microbes for what they consider the "Boring Billion" (a term insensitively meant for the stalling of multicellular life, early in Earth's history). Microbes that thrived on sulfur washed out into the oceans and interfered with early photosynthesizing processes that generated oxygen from water, scientists now propose.

Couldn't the microbes have their fun too? What's boring to us may've been the time of their lives! I'd most simply love to be any one of those sulfur sucking jerks for one day, just to be on a planet free of humans and the restraint of so many goddamn cells. And what's the rush anyhow? Are you expecting a better world today, if only we multi-celled party crashers would have snuck in earlier? Flying cars, downloadable thoughts and reality commanding networks of brain activity that would have made Earth rather an Olympus, one long playground of the Gods. Assuming, that is, if multicellular life commenced as soon as The Great Oxidation hit the street charts, us humans are the eventual beneficiaries. I am skeptical.

I like to think of events in terms of sequence and consequence. One sequence leads to consequence, which becomes the sequence for the following consequence, and so on and so on. To change one sequence is to change every sequence and consequence that therefore follows. This is obviously the point that the scientists and I agree upon, since its precisely this alteration on consequence that they seek by dreaming of getting the biological ball rolling in the pre-quarter. However, all things considered I think things turned out rather well. Life is such a specific, spontaneous orchestra of conditions and opportunities that one shift in either and we might not even have ever arrived to our present state, we could have easily been a fad, a quick trend; not just humans but mammals altogether, pushed aside by the next big hit. Or maybe under the shadows of dinosaurs or giant telepathic crab-squids.

Now I know that the scientists aren't really resentful of these microbes, that its just the possible beginnings to understanding why life took so long to boom when the conditions were more or less available. I wrote this more so, for the funny, proud ones out there who had it in their mind to actually yield irresponsible contempt for the sulfur-dieting, prehistoric hipsters that "robbed" them of a farther evolved present; one that they might possibly feel entitled to.