Well well, seem like the more you think about it the more you find topics for a blog. Anyway, I went last weekend with my pregnant wife to see this movie called "Earth" (Planettaamme Maa for the Finnish readers), taken from the BBC Wolrdwide and Green Light Media production series of the same name that has had a great success especially in the U.S. through the Discovery Channel and now presented to the World by Disneynature in the form of a movie/documentary. Following track of different species around the World during the lapse of 4 years.
We had been planning to go and see this movie for a while and we finally made it, just in time as apparently they are not showing it here in Finland anymore. Anyway, it was worth every single second i spent on that theater, seriously, if you missed it, you definitely have to rent it or something!
I usually don't cry when I see movies, not that I am not a sensitive person but you know, someone has to
be the tough guy....näh not really, I just think by having studied acting doesn't help me and my credibility with
movies that much...but the thing is, I couldn't help it with this one, if you don't give a shit about nature, which I really doubt, then just watch it for the sake of the photography, i
t is just astonishing!! My favorite one, and it was really hard to pick one particular tak
e, was of a great white shark jumping it's way out of the ocean with a
pray on its mouth
and in a very slow motion, what a shot of this incredible creature!!
It all starts with a female polar bear and her two little cubs, you cannot help but feel touched by the incredible beauty of this animal, most likely doomed to a near extinction unless something really dramatic happens soon!! The movie takes you then all the way through desserts, rain forests, tundra, sabana and oceans to the south pole, and after a couple of no less dramatically beautiful southern light takes, all the way back to the beautiful white nordic characters.
The way the series has been condensed into one movie is a piece of art itself, the narration is extraordinary and as I said before, the photography of the movie is definitely worth the Oscar of the decade, plus the sequence and the
way it was all organized is equally marvelous. It's a real eye-opener to realize how easily we humans go through life, compared with how much struggle different species have to experience in order to survive. Of course getting to this point has taken a lot of effort within the evolution cycle, which we never realize.
We want to believe that we have the edge, as evolution has given us the advantage of more complex brains that allow us to create and use different and extremely complex tools that have made hunting and finishing only spare time activities instead of survival necessities.
But I think our problem is our arrogance as we believe so blindly that we are the best adapted for survival, therefore, why to care about the rest of the organisms? Well we are actually not. Mammals haven't really been here for that long, just about 200 million years, and of that, humans have been around for about 2.5 million years, that is a ridiculously small amount of time compared with the 4.6 billion years of the Earth, and we are by far in the group of the most fragile ones. So being a big multicellular and complex organism doesn't actually give us any particular edge, as a matter of fact, bacteria will probably be still here long after we are gone as it has been here l
ong before we came.
My point is, we are just instruments, experiments of evolution, just a transitional specie, we are not here to stay forever, nor is any of the other species, we will all have to evolve or die, just as natural selection dictates while, so far, colonizing other planets still seems as science fiction, and even if we do, we are still bounded by staying within our solar system due to the restrictions that the loooong distances in the universe and the laws of physics represent.
In about 50 million years, our planet will be extremely harsh for multicellular organisms to exist, and in about 5 billion years, our sun will make it absolutely inhabitable making
it look more like Venus, and that is of course, without considering the fact that we will crash with Andromeda in about 2 billion years. So then again, in geological times, we really don't have to much time.
Now I don't mean you shouldn't care about life, on the contrary, realizing this has helped me understand how fortunate we really are right now and how much beauty we still find in almost every single corner of our planet. Whether or not life itself has a particular purpose (most likely it doesn't) it has gone through so much struggle to get to where it is right now, and just for the sake of that I think we should learn to respect it and to assume the evolutional role that has been given to us, and as long as the Earth supports life, what right do we have to screw it up?
As I will become a father soon, I want my daughter to understand this and to think twice before smashing a spider with her foot. To realize all the time-investment, trial and error and huge struggle of adaptation that has resulted in the beautiful complexity of that particular organism so that she can think which rights does she posses to decide whether or not that small wonder of nature should live or not. To respect life for what it has been, what it is and what it will be for as long as this planet allows it.
That is my moral side towards nature, using my brain, respecting what has taken so much effort and endless combinations and errors to be created, instead of taking the approach of fearing of a powerful and arbitrary magician that created everything within a blink of an eye. I'm sure we all have smashed a spider at some point, even those who believe in an absolute creator, yet we are all here, without any particular punishment, so basing my morality in that assumption doesn't really give me strong arguments. It took me a lot of effort to understand it, but I am glad I did and can really use this small period of geological time that was given to me by a mere combination of almost improbable probabilities called life. And so I think this movie is a tribute to that extraordinary quest, definitely worth checking it out!
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