Today is a beautiful day ...
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Today's beauty merited three folders:
Flying Eagle - Birds and beauty encountered on the way to Ft. DeSoto, featuring the Tierra Verde bald eagle perched and then flying. Then the Gulf Pier with its flock of pelicans and many dolphins
Baby Ospreys - two osprey nests with babies, one of which is fully feathered and beginning to flap its wings and the other is so young that it must have just recently hatched
Happy Dolphins - parrots, egrets, pelicans and dolphins having fun stealing fish from the fishermen on the Gulf Pier
***
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke
http://www.quotationspage.com/...
I have found just such a technology: Nature. Life is the ultimate miracle. Life is the ultimate mystery.
Humankind's technology cannot compete with Nature's technology. Consider the ospreys with their babies, the bald eagle flying, and the dolphins who evidently enjoy life immensely.
After spending time with these creatures I feel immense pity for humankind, especially those humans who are devoted to their two tons of metal (the SUV) or to money ($40 billion isn't worth anything at all to me) or to "progress" (I see all of these oblivious people hooked into their iPods and cellphones and wonder: do humans really want to live in their own extremely little world?).
This world that humans have created cannot compete with Nature. The Earth has remained alive for four billion years. Technological civilization won't survive for more than a handful of centuries at most.
Our civilization wasn't built to last forver and it isn't. If you want to see the dismal future of civilization you should watch the Life After People series:
http://www.history.com/...
As the most recent episode demonstrated, though, civilization's demise does not require the eradication of humans. The forces of erosion never stop working. Humans, however, have no choice except to stop working. So eventually, inevitably, inescapably the works of humankind all succumb to erosion and cease to exist.
It only takes Nature and handful of decades to destroy modern buildings and much less time to demolish houses and break asphalt. If you travel around your city with your eyes open you will undoubtedly find dozens of examples of erosion destroying buildings and parking lots and so forth.
Nature's already working hard at destroying all of humankind's accomplishments. Nature won't stop working until all of these things are destroyed.
Eventually none of humankind's accomplishments shall remain. Nature erases everything.
So I'm not impressed by human technology nor by civilization nor by any of humankind's "lofty" goals. The Earth is a living planet not a technological planet. Life survives, technology is always and forever dead.
And this is exactly as it should be on the Earth. The Universe did not spend the last 13.7 billion years waiting for the Homo sapiens to appear. The sun won't stop shining on the day the Homo sapiens go extinct.
In the great scheme of things humankind is nothing. Please do learn to value only valuable things.
David Mathews
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