If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...

Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.

This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.

Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.

But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.

All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.

Ditto for us humans generally.

God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.

We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.

Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.

A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.

So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.

Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.

If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.

Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.

If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.

But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.

And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.

Hence this book ...

LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

For in virtually all the illustrated fantasies about future life spawned by a raft of interwar era popular science magazines, humanity is seen as living inside an man-made plastic bubble on stark rock planets.

Inside the bubble, we humans are using some futuristic form of atomic energy to turn the bare rock into synthetic versions of all the things humans need to survive.

LIFE (other life anyway) was clearly 'not wanted on this future voyage'.

Today's children might innocently think 1930s humanity would instead cherish every last example of LIFE, from invisible bacteria to blue whale, if only as companions to share humans' otherwise incredibly lonely existence on a vast totally empty and hostile Universe.

But instead educated humanity during the Great Depression sought, via Eugenics, to eliminate every example of humanity that didn't fit their concepts of perfection and normality.

And the educated's casual acceptance of over-fishing and over-hunting, combined with scientific humanity's enormous research into various lethal forms of pesticides, suggested that the 1930s thought they could get along, quite nicely thank you, without other lifeforms competing for Earth's supposedly limited non-biological resources.

But LIFE is actually far more unstable than even the most unstable metallic element.

And no, lifeforms can't really survive by taking in each other's laundry.

Lifeforms can only flourish and reproduce by recycling each other's poop, because LIFE actually makes use of very little of the rock that makes up almost all of this planet.

Instead, we earthlings live out our entire lives on the Earth's surface , surviving off of and in the debris LIFE itself has created over four billion years.

We living beings ceaselessly recycle each other's waste products or decaying dead bodies, constantly re-creating the humus of LIFE.

Remember, all the oxygen we humans need to survive is just a waste product to the plants and microbes that need to throw it off if they too are to survive.

Meanwhile many of the microbes, in turn, only survive by consuming the dead bodies of other life - humans among that number.

LIFE only comes as one complete - indivisible - package and this package currently seems to be unique to this single tiny little planet in all the vast Universe.

So, no The Sixth Extinction and Plenticide isn't murder : its murder-suicide ....