Extincton

there is a comet coming. i can feel it like an itch at the back of my neck as we descend back into the plane of the spiral galaxy. those arms pose serious dilemmas. when the doomsday asteroid arrives, it will find a planet already recovering from a mass extinction event, and the two will get blurred together for future paleontologists to sort out. the Permian mass extinction was obviously set off by a bolide of some sort that hit the Earth square in the ocean, releasing ancient trapped gasses that were already present at dangerous levels.

sometimes i wonder how it is that we are doing the work of evolution, letting one species of African drosophiliid wander the continents while driving extinct a thousand in Hawaii, encouraging rock doves on every continent, procuring species from one continent and dropping them on another, erasing sixty million year old biogeographic signatures, beavers in the Amazon, rabbits in Australia, boa constrictors in the Everglades and, nearly everywhere, houseflies.