My Legacy

December 22, 2007

Irvine, CA

What with global warming and peak oil, peak water, peak everything, overpopulation, etc., not to mention the fact that species, like individuals, have a lifespan, I am concerned. Our human species will one day die out if only from old age. Even if we should plug along for a few billion years there is the scientific certainty that one day our sun will balloon into a red giant, its fiery atmosphere extending out beyond the orbit of Mars, first blowing away Earth's atmosphere, then its oceans, and finally rendering it nothing more than a dead burnt cinder, all traces of that proud and haughty race of primates that once strutted its hour upon the stage utterly lost, vanquished and vanished. With that scenario in mind, I have arranged to have my writings, a photograph, and a swab of DNA from inside my cheek blasted into space on the next intergalactic spacecraft. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I am going to survive this thing.

[Postscript, circa 10 billion years hence, found in the records of an extinct alien race on the planet Xorthrop, circling the star Exeter in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud: ". . . . thus the pestilence Homo Sapien started its inexorable spread across the Milky Way galaxy, rendering planet by planet, each in turn, ruined and uninhabitable."] This from Christopher Cokinos in Orion Magazine, "The consolations of extinction are the comforts of deep time, an acceptance of passage. “Take your place with grace,” Bruce Cockburn sings, “and then be on your way.” The consolations of extinction are an acceptance of death, of all deaths, always, in all places. My lover, myself, my parents, my sister and niece, my grandnephew, my friends, my two sweet cats. The orioles this season sipping nectar from a feeder. The American dipper that makes sounds like clacking pebbles as it flies upriver, downriver, and back again. The river itself. The foothills I glimpse from my hammock are the shorelines of ancient Lake Bonneville, whose remnant Great Salt Lake will dry up too. Families die. Genera die. Whole ecosystems die. The solar system’s planets—nine, no, eight, or, okay, maybe twelve, count ‘em how you will—they’re goners too. Stars, including all 400 billion in the Milky Way: doomed. Galaxies, all of them, all 100-plus billion of them: doomed. Even protons will decay someday, the ages of the atom finally closed. This universe—one, perhaps, in an infinite multiverse—will die in a darkness and cold beyond our imaginings." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.