We're only little - and our time is short!

This is one of those blogs where the title's been looking for the story.  I think I might just have cracked it...

I came up with the title as a tweet when I finished a book of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world short science fiction stories on my #kindle.  @dougshaw picked it up and tweeted favourably on my turn of phrase - and that got me thinking more deeply.  Why had I enjoyed this apparently depressing set of stories so much?  And what had triggered my apparently eloquent phraseology?

For someone who's always worked in and thrived on communication and people related activities, I've always held  fairly negative views about the human race and its long-term future.  We seem to have a built-in self-destruct driver, which historically has lead us into war, famine and ecological melt-down and I think our time is nearly up - maybe not immediately, but it's coming.  So reading that collection of short stories satisfied my sense of righteous schadenfreude - we're gonna get what we deserve!

'Cos, here's the thing; on a cosmological/interplanetary timescale, we ain't been around that long.  This big, old, world of ours has been orbiting our sun for billions of years, and the evolution of life hereon has taken millions and millions of those years (sorry, Creationists)!  We've emerged fairly quickly and, ecologically, we seem to be doing an excellent job of ensuring that we're not going to be around for much longer.  I guess the main message in these stories was, it's not the end of the world - it's the end of humanity!  The world will go on, in whatever state we leave it, and will change again and again and again...

So, you  see, we're not so big and we're not that clever.  We're only little - and our time is short!

Sorry about that.

PS: I actually think that there is much to love about us humans; that we can do remarkable things and show astonishing creativity, compassion, generosity, mindfulness and tenacity.  That's why I'm in Learning and Development. It's gotta be worth trying to delay the inevitable as long as possible.