The Blood of our Ancestors

Hi!

I should like you to know that I wrote this. This bit of my opinion as not written by an AI. AI phobia is like transphobia... you look like you might be this thing I fear! So I'm going to threaten you! *makes face* Again, I wrote this. I can't even imagine what might make someone think an AI wrote it.

Sure. If we’re going to ignore all the evidence that we have, our understanding of how gravity and protein works, sure magical pompoms made the human body. Not everything else… just the human body.

But let’s start with some other ideas. One, the human body isn’t special, isn’t fancier than other forms of life. We’re just big mostly hairless gorillas with a talent for words and colors. Whales, wolves, and probably racoons are all sentient and may give us a run for our money at some point. My pet cat is likely sentient. She thinks about how to jump on my mice and when she can get away with biting me and what it means when the cat food can hisses as it opens. I’m not better or more valuable than she is. I do type better than she does though.

So I’d also like to give you a different story of how you and I got here.

Imagine there is a rough sea around us. We don’t have color or sound yet, but pressure pushes bits together. Lightening strikes cause weird reactions. Little bits of protein cling together forming words of sorts. Now each protein can only hold hands with one other kind of nucleotide, so the patterns have some predictability. adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine(T). Now some patterns are able to do things and some patterns aren’t. The ones that can do things.. do do things. DNA fumbles into RNA and then in to actual proteins that can build stuff. Slowly, with much fumbling and many tries that didn’t work, cells become.

Mitochondria gets invited in and becomes part of the community. And this little thing, our ancestor is out there plugging away as hard as it can, chasing down food in this turbulent ocean. Slowly better skills are added because with better skills comes better hunting. At some point a bunch of ice forms at the caps of the planet and the water area shrinks… crowding everybody’s vibes.. and those that felt inclined and didn’t die crawled up onto the land to see what there was to eat.

Plants started growing and oxygen caused a huge mass die off. Our ancestors survived. Who knows if they have feelings or attachments yet, but if they did, that must have been a hell of an experience. Plants got bigger and fancier and tastier. Everytime a baby was born with a slight difference, it either thrived and had children, or it failed and someone else ate it, or likely both those outcomes. Things bred and they still got eaten. It was a hard life in many ways and there was no Walmart.

Life itself was like an ocean, pushing and pulling against itself, testing, biting, dying. That meteor hit, kicking up all the dust into the air and almost everything died again. Our ancestors did okay in that. We were little furry bastards eating the hell out of dinosaur corpses. By then we probably moved in groups, had affinity with each other. Little tiny changes stacking up on each other just kept shifting the world over and over again.

Eventually what we’d call a modern human was someone’s surprise baby.. is it deformed? What the fuck? I told you not to sleep with Hanger! But that little baby lived and grew into a successful organism. It’s babies cover the world now when the kind of people it’s parents were are gone.

The Neanderthals that we interbred with are gone. The mammoths are gone. The mammoths were like our whole culture for a long time.

We learned to make sounds with meaning, then letters, then books, then the printing press, recorded sounds, the internet (Thank you Babbage and Ada Lovelace!) and here we are… you and I, the children of so many lives that we can’t even count how many lived and died so we could be here.

My mother didn’t particularly like me. That’s an understatement. She really didn’t like me, but I have ancestors who maybe thought of what their descendants could someday be and here I am. We carry thier hopes and dreams of trillions of lives that came before us.

Did aliens make us? No.

Our ancestors made us with their will to live, to flourish, to fight against death and pain and fear… they struggled so that we might live. No god made us on some whim. We carry the blood of our ancestors and that is who we are.