What’s Left Behind
“So long, and thanks for all the fish.” — Douglas Adams
When we’re gone, and all that’s left is the doomsday-documentary establishing shot of crumbling roads and cell phone towers and moss-covered server rooms in mouldering buildings, I wonder what our home’s next residents will think of us. They’ll see the airports and the cemeteries, but they’ll miss all the music. All the eye contact. All the ways we talk to one another without speaking. They’ll miss the shouting too. Without the people interacting with them, all our symbols will lose their power: sports stadiums and monuments will be reduced to bizarre wastes of space and resources.
They’ll see the destruction we caused with our own unbridled ego, all the devastation we wrought on our rented home. Will it hit them — that all the metal, all the concrete, all the art and the subways and the skyscrapers, were our attempts to reach one another? They won’t be able to watch us smile at babies or reach out our hands to pet street cars, won’t see us pull someone into our arms or gather together at candlelight vigils. The importance of being known, and seen, and embraced by your fellow humans may not translate if all you can see is the leftover construction material. What will they think of us? If all that’s left is the remnants of our conquering, imperialist selves, will they understand what it was all for?
When they see the permanent evidence of our belief in our own singularity, will they know that all of it was done in the service of connecting with one another? Even the shitty parts — the oil derricks and the sunken megayachts reclaimed as luxury digs for sea cucumbers — we imagined all of it, built it and squandered it, in the hopes that other people would notice us. Take pride in us. Sleep with us. If only we had enough money or beauty or whatever. We did it all to knit ourselves together with others — even the killing and the pillaging were probably in service of some general somewhere trying to impress his girlfriend. Someone, somewhere, probably caused nuclear annihilation to make themselves look big and powerful and in control. At our best, and at our worst, we were all trying to be less alone. And the flotsam we left behind is proof of the obscene lengths we’ll go for the connection we ache for.
Does it matter if our home’s newest members get it? I’d hate for our legacy to be judged by the discarded remnants of our attempted utopia. Of course, being judged by what’s left behind is the textbook definition of a legacy and besides, I’ll be dead. But if I got the chance to speak to Earth’s newest benevolent overlords, I’d try to make them see that we weren’t all bad. We weren’t all good either, or we wouldn’t be in this mess. We’re a big, blue marble full of nuance — complex people shuffling around in our skin suits wondering if we’re good enough. We cause ecstasy and harm in equal measure trying to prove to the other skin suits that we’re worth loving. And if what’s left behind is the scattered remains of human progress, the aliens will miss out on all of the ways we tried our incomplete, imperfect best to not be so alone out here in the universe.
