Imagine if you can, a race of brilliant creatures a few millimeters tall. Their greatest city extends the size of an average human backyard. Their magnificent skyscrapers have observation decks that would brush against your ankles.
Most live, fear, hope, love, hate and die within a space the size of your
living room. In their world, that space contains ghettos and palaces,
universities and brothels, factories and cemeteries. War and peace, broken
treaties and tenuous promises between tribes separated by mere meters. Delicate balances of delicate civilizations.
Together, they reach other planets, set up other world civilizations, create
robots and machines, live free of want. But then one day, they vanish. Life
continues; without them, beyond them, past them. 50,000 years of history and 50 billion of them become increasingly irrelevant as time passes.
Millions of years go by. Creatures live and die, the continents drift to form
new land masses and eventually another, slightly more foolish, creature rises, the human being.
This one is larger, 1,000 times the size. They cannot see the great ruins of
the ancient cities, they don’t know what to look for. Most of the past
disappears without a trace, nearly undetectable among a sea of noise.
Humans are blinded to only see their special brand of human made patterns. Brilliance existing beyond them is merely a philosophical conjecture that few, if any, seriously engage in.
The satellites and moon civilizations are far too small for the giants to spot.
They assume they are the first and most important. That ambitious suffocating ego, a terrible flaw of the creature. A crucial, deadly flaw.
But who could blame them, the arrogant bastards. They mindlessly step on the past, crushing it under their feet without the slightest awareness.
They’re also about to vanish and sadly they won’t be missed either.
