Humans as Chemotherapy

If you’ve ever experienced it or seen it in action, chemotherapy doesn’t seem very good. It is a brutal process. Oncologists practice the fine art of killing the cancer without entirely killing the patient. But the balancing act isn’t always successful.

Suppose the earth were semi-sentient, and had some vague billion-year-long evolutionary memory that suggested a looming apocalyptic danger.

Imagine that humans are a kind of inflammatory immune response, a form of self-administered chemotherapy: physics-wielding primates designed to avert the worst life-ending crisis (think: using nuclear weapons to divert a major asteroid impact), at the cost of a mass extinction, climate destabalization, and irreversible global pollution.

If you were the earth, would you make that trade? I would.