Excerpt: Northern Lights (working title.)

At the time of the dinosaurs, we did not exist.

I always found this fact sort of amazing, that there was a point in time when no one or nothing anywhere were doing or thinking or developing or anything at all. There were only the great lizards ( okay, they’re not lizards. I’m at a loss for nouns.) of myth and legend, prowling the earth, ruling as it was possibly meant to be.

Then, a stupid asteroid entered the stratosphere and ruined everything.

The dinosaurs died, the other organisms that weren’t dinosaurs died, and a drought (in theory.) overtook the planet and life generally sucked for a long time.

But, even if the dinosaurs got the short end of the stick in this particular situation, it’s a plus for us. If it hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have gotten a chance-- not even the smallest sliver of a chance-- to be. Humans wouldn’t have developed, wouldn’t have thought, wouldn’t have discovered, wouldn’t have taught, laughed, loved, anything.

To imagine that there was a time when there was nothing but animal instinct, that there was no vaguely human rationale until some fish crawled out of the ocean and onto the land and decided it liked it there better than in the water…. That is truly a fantastic and terrifying thing.

Humans, in all their frightfulness, are kind of awesome. Think of all the things we as a race have accomplished. Sure, a lot of these things are killing the planet that keeps us alive, but we’re the only race (that we know of) that has ever managed to do it. And the cool thing about it? We’re never going to stop. Ever. Humans want to keep going, want to keep inventing, creating, making. Unless an apocalyptic catastrophe were to occur and wipe out every human on the planet, we would never stop.