The shelf lives of dinosaurs
We live in an age of dinosaurs. You thought they disappeared 65 million years ago? You're technically correct, except you're also wrong. Not a day goes by where I don't interact with ancient beasts. I wear the long-since dead on my body in the form of my fleece pants. I hear regressive dino aficionados argue why we need to keep slurping up liquified fossils from the earth. I empty the filter of my air purifier when it gets clogged with lighter-than-life pieces of plastic. I use a fax machine, once assumed extinct, to send information to my government. I watch the birds outside my window squawk and fly with the echoes of their primordial ancestors.
Little children love the idea of dinosaurs. We take them to museums and show them T-rex skeletons and place their tiny hands in a cast of a dino footprint, the cast itself derived from dinos. Little children imagine themselves walking among these gigantic beasts, like Ray Bradbury's main character in The Butterfly Effect, perfectly transported back to prehistory. Little do they know they live in the presence of dinosaurs when they put on their shoes before school, when they romp around playgrounds at recess, when they read textbooks with since-extirpated knowledge.
We still aren't entirely sure if an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and we'll never be certain unless we break spacetime enough to travel through it. But I'm not so sure these terrible lizards ever fully left us. Fossils find their way to fresh air in suburban backyards, in valleys carved from rushing rivers, in barren wind-whipped badlands. Traditionally geologists did one of three things: teach, discover, drill. Maybe oil executives are just overgrown kids, still hoping to meet a dinosaur in the flesh one morning at breakfast, but satisfied to settle for liquefied memories of the poor creatures.
They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it likes to rhyme. I think the dinosaurs might have the last laugh this time. Almost as quickly as they collapsed worldwide, we've brought them back to life, dispersing them across our fields and into our skies. Sure, maybe they couldn't eat our heads off with sharp teeth in this state, but we've disregarded their ability to persist. Some days I wish I was still in fifth grade, spending a night at the museum so I could say I had a paleontological slumber party. I don’t need to pretend that, though, sitting here in my synthetic-lined home. Hundreds of years from now, petrochemical products will outlive my own bones. It's dinosaurs all the way down.
I don't think we'll ever follow the Jurassic Park model, with raptors running amok, but I'm not sure our current strategy is any better. Either way we're bringing the deceased back to life, extracting whatever vitality we can from their remains, and calling it a successful scientific endeavor. We think we're the victors, but I'd argue the dinosaurs will win in the end, as we so kindly resurrect them for an encore on this planet. Maybe one day dinosaurs will reign supreme again, and we'll be the sludge they suck out of the ground.
For now I keep wary of the terrible lizards around us, of history laughing at our expense. I do my paperwork and seek warmth in the winter and watch extinctions abound. I secretly wish for something paleontological to poke out of the ground, reminding me where I'm from and where I'm going to be, to show me that my life is a blink of a blink in the grand scheme of everything. Yet I’m tired of exhuming what was better left buried; we can only learn so much before we lose track of what’s real and right here and alive.
Besides, I think our chances of making it are better than in the dinosaurs’ time. It’s one thing to adapt to a catastrophic asteroid strike. It’s something else to pivot, preemptively, together, toward a more sustainable way of life. History might not look kindly on us down the line, but I’d like for it to say we at least tried to survive.