On a watery world orbiting an insignificant star on the outer edges of a galaxy named by a tiny fraction of its inhabitants, the Milky Way, catastrophic climatic and ecological changes were underway. The relatively cool crust of the planet’s tectonic plates were adjusting themselves in an aeons-old pattern of strain reduction, releasing billions of joules of heat and mechanical energy. The planet’s erstwhile owners, who had arrogantly named themselves Homo Sapiens Sapiens, in honor of their self-vaunted abilities to reason, had polluted and overpopulated the planet to an astonishing degree. They had literally dumped thousands of tons of gaseous compounds into the planet’s atmosphere without considering the consequences of their actions. Nitrous oxides, ozone, sulfides, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon tetrachloride, and methane poured from their industrial smoke stacks, automobiles, waste dumps and domestic middens in unceasing plumes to mix with the planet’s fragile ecology. As a rule (that is largely unknown to people who are not in “tune” with the universe), planets are types of living entities and as such demonstrate at least one characteristic of life, i.e., they are irritable. In a biologic sense, irritability is generally defined to mean that the organism in question reacts to external stimuli. Aside from this characteristic, planets do not as a rule have all the taxonomic requirements of life that biologists have agreed are a prime requisite for being included in the classification lists for living organisms. Planets are sui generis, an atypical form of life. On the other hand, neither does a virus. A virus replicates by “pirating” the cellular mechanism of the infected organism and uses it’s chemical factory to create a multitude of viral “clones”. A virus has no metabolic means to increase it’s energy such as the phytogenic organelles present in plant cells or the means to ingest food such as an amoebae or bacteria does. The energy a virus needs must be “stolen” from living cells. Planets do at least eat. A planet ingests “food” by sweeping the zone of its orbit with its gravitational field and draws down a rain of meteoric particles into its atmosphere to incorporate the molecules into its mass. Planets “eliminate” by radiating heat through the atmospheric envelope (or if you like, the outer limits of its mass) and by losing molecules of its upper atmosphere to the photonic pressure created by the solar “wind”. Like viruses, they cannot reproduce without outside assistance. Nonetheless, they display the prime characteristic of life; they are irritable. This particular planet in question, designated “Earth” by some of its denizens, was downright disgusted. It had every reason to be piqued. Earth was a mess. The atmosphere was heating up, its oceans were dying; the delicate balance in its ecology had been mangled by the dominant species that presumed ownership of the planet.

 

In vast areas of the northern hemisphere supposedly “pure” rain was heavily contaminated with both nitric and sulfuric acids. Vast fresh water lakes that had existed for a million years had been destroyed in a scant score of annual revolutions around the planet’s star by a purblind proletarian government. Species of plants and animals that had existed for aeons were fading into extinction before the silly scions of simians could discover and categorize their place in the ecology. One of the latest eco-crimes by the planet’s inhabitants had a side-effect that would have made the planet grin in maliciously human fashion if it had had a face. The world’s rain forests were being harvested for their hardwood trees at a rate that was unheard of in history. The unwarranted stripping of the forest land contributed to the heating of the atmosphere by removing the solar absorbing and cooling mass of transpiring leaves as well as diminishing the CO₂ to O₂ conversion process that had supported the ecological balance. In the forest’s place was left naked soil that easily eroded under tropical conditions. The thin top layer of fecund forest soil washed into nearby rivers poisoning the waterways and leaving barren soil that lay only inches beneath the black residue of ten thousand years of ecological recycling of leafy matter. The inhospitable subsoil that remained was incapable of supporting more than the most marginal of life.