Writing is more of a past time for me. I have been involved in some projects though:
The Tiger and the Buffalo: This was a musical I wrote with a friend of mine based on our experiences moving across the country to New York City. We submitted it to a contest in New York and almost got a prize. We didn’t because apparently it was a real “love it or hate it” thing with the judges. Still, it’s always fun to tell people I wrote a musical, even though I didn’t really write any of the songs.
I also wrote a bit for the sound recording blog. Probably they are a bit more indicative of my style.
December 6th 2025: I recently wrote something about rats as a connection to the next intelligent race on earth:
Rats are the Silurian Passport
“Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow” -Mark Twain
In this case, I’d like to put something off by 100 million years. The destruction of the human race and much of the animal and plant life as we know it are distinct possibilities we live with every day. Nuclear war is again on the table. The slow roll of climate change seems unstoppable, unless the planet pulls together. This essay has no new ideas about what to do about those things, or how to put them off any further.
What I’d like to put off is our idea of “The End”. This concept is all around us, and has been for a very long time. What’s relatively new is that we now have non-religious ways to worry reasonably about a planet-wide event which means the end of us, the humans. The end of us is not the end of everything, however.
As often happens in Portland, I saw a rat on the sidewalk while walking home. It came out from an alcove, and waddled along the wall. It seemed very much like someone who works in admin on their nightly commute home to the family. We shared the sidewalk for a bit, unhurried, before it turned a corner to continue its evening.
I’m going to be light on the rat anecdotes here, simply because almost everyone who has lived in a city has their own. As long as there are cities this will be the case. Even after the cities are empty and there are no more people to swap anecdotes about them the rats will be there. They are as close to eternal as any mammal can get.
This became apparent to me when I went into a disorganized used bookstore a few years ago and saw, on what could be called the introductory pile, a book that I had first seen in the gift shop of the Chicago Museum of Natural History as a child. The book was an encyclopedia of prehistoric creatures. It made a strong impression on me as a child. Besides the dinosaurs, there were artists’ renditions of elephants with mouths like shovels, and the single horn rhino that had inspired the myths of the unicorn. For some reason I didn’t get it at the time. But I never forgot it, and instantly recognized it the second I saw it. This time I took it home.
Reading about early mammals put in perspective exactly how long our ancestors were in the shadow of the dinosaurs. Before we were anything else, mammals were basically mice, rat, or squirrel-like for about 150 million years. Yet contained within them was the potential to become us. Similar to the potential for information in a book to be unlocked by the right person, who finds it in the most random of circumstances.
What I also realized by looking through this book was how many strange dead-ends evolution had taken after mammals radiated across the world. Armadillos the size of cars, moose with antlers twelve feet wide, apes that seemed consumed with remaking the world. In spite of all these experiments, the essential form of mammals has never been improved in terms of its ability to survive. None of these evolutionary branches ever became something as durable as the ancestral form.
Our own arrogance as a species lends evidence to this point. No one doubts that rats would outlive anything we might throw at them. If it were possible to get rid of them, we would have a long time ago. In some sense, evolutionarily speaking, they are “smarter” than us. Their genetic code contains both the ability to adapt to the present, as well as anything we might throw at them in the future. Their ubiquity is both a testament to the durability of their form, as well as a reason to despise them.
Despite thinking of them as worse than garbage, they also represent our past. Just as we were in the past through our ancient Jurassic ancestors, rats today contain endless potentialities waiting for the right moment to show themselves.
Of course, for those potentialities to have a chance of emerging, the world would have to be a very different place. This is where I think reframing how we view rats can be a helpful mind experiment to deal with “The End”.
“The End” is a popular topic, mostly to think about in the back of our minds. “The End” can be in regards to the human race as a whole, or to ourselves and our friends and family. Either way, we avoid thinking about it. Maybe more accurately, we avoid thinking about what comes after it. It’s fundamentally inconceivable to know what it’s like to receive no stimuli, and to have no existence as a living thing. This is why people have spent so much time making end runs around the reality of it, with elaborate afterlives, reincarnation, wills and endowments, children, perhaps bodies of work. Even though we all die, each time it happens to someone we know, actually know, it tears a hole in reality in some way. For some period of time nothing makes sense, and a singularity of grief ripples through those who knew the deceased. Like the singularity of a black hole, the normal rules of behaviour don’t apply in this brief space just after someone’s life disappears beyond the event horizon. The only recovery is to know we, and many others are still here.
The end of the human race doesn’t offer this kind of recovery. For some lonely person, their death will represent the end of the human race as well. Sad for them! However, various content which flirts with this situation are very popular. Pre and post-apocalyptic stories of all kinds have become an established genre. Even post-post-apocalyptic stories are a sub genre, as long as the stories have humans in them. What we are incapable of thinking about is a world without humans sometime in the future. We’re nowhere near having any kind of acceptance of the idea. Even saying it fills us with terror is giving people a bit too much credit. Most of us never get that far.
Let me be clear, I don’t want the human race to end. I want it to continue for a long, long time and live well. The problem is, things often don’t add up. When environmentalists and scientists say we have 10-20 years to reduce emissions and keep the climate in check, and then I read about the governments of the world, it’s hard to completely believe in humanity’s ability to turn things around. So I think about “The End”. Is this really a new situation? There must have been another planet somewhere in the universe that had intelligent life which burned itself out before it knew what it was doing. We can’t be the only ones, I think, if only to be less embarrassed by my species.
Then, thinking about the topic of this essay, I realize I’m trying to find a way around “The End”. Science fiction and its promises of starships and aliens are probably not going to happen before climate disaster. Thinking it might is another way of avoiding what’s right in front of us. So, maybe we can save ourselves from embarrassment by looking at what is right in front of us.
There is a hypothesis that asks the question of what impact we might leave on the planet that might be detectable in the geological record. It’s known as the Silurian Hypothesis. “Silurian” comes from a time period on earth long before the dinosaurs, although it’s probably more well known from the show “Dr. Who” as the name of a race of reptilians which predated humans by millions of years. The idea behind the hypothesis is that if a highly intelligent species evolved and had a similar society as ours, say 200 million years ago, it might only be barely detectable through scientific methods today. Our ability to detect it would depend on factors such as how long it was around, what technologies they used, etc. Even if the chemical signatures were extensive, the geologic processes of Earth might make them very difficult to detect, assuming we were lucky enough to find a sample of undisturbed crust from that time.
It’s important to note the author of the Silurian Hypothesis didn’t actually believe his theory was true. He was very careful to point out there was absolutely no evidence pointing to the existence of a previous society of lizard people. That doesn’t preclude parts of the Silurian Hypothesis from becoming true in the future. For instance, we could become the Silurians for another future intelligent species.
This is where the rats have been waiting for us. I know you enjoyed not reading about them for a minute, but I couldn’t go on about death forever. There’s no denying rats are gross, but the things we hate most about them are also the things that make them most like us. In a study of rats in the countryside, rats were allowed to colonize a patch of land. They raised their young, made extensive tunnel cities, and lived peaceably. They were actually pretty relatable. The other side of this is that they are also tenacious survivors, and will become more vicious and prone to anti-social behaviors as they become more crowded and numerous in a given area, such as our cities. With us out of the way, they would be free to spread far and wide through the wreckage of what we leave behind. It’s possible we could take out many other species on the way out, but rats won’t be one of them.
It’s quite possible that if the human race dies out, and rats survive, another mammalian radiation could take place which would result in the rise of another highly intelligent and highly social animal with something like our abilities. It might take 60-100million years, or it might never happen at all. But we know that it happened at least once. The only instance we are aware of came from mammals. So there’s no reason to say it couldn’t happen again.
Does the possible existence of distant cousins (via our rat cousins) living somewhat like us far in the future address some of the anxieties we have about “The End”? This future civilization may not technically be human, but for the sake of argument, let’s say they look and act the same as us. Does it provide us any comfort to know that there might be beings on Earth which perceive the world as we do, even if we destroy ourselves?
Perhaps humans are only one iteration in a cycle that repeats many times on Earth. In this sense, each civilization would be the Silurians for the next. The rats, I hypothesize, are a likely passport from one form of intelligent life to the next. Approaching things this way allows us to move beyond a state of fear for the loss of all human consciousness. Instead we can actually engage with the cycles of our planet in a way which gives us context for “The End”.
Probably I’ve gone too far with all of this. Not everyone, and probably most people, don’t derive comfort from abstract ideas like this, even if they get what seems like a clever essay out of it.
What about all our knowledge, our technology, the sum total of everything we’ve learned and haven’t forgotten? All of us attempt to make our mark in some way, even if it’s small. It’s one thing to feel as if what you’ve done in life won’t be remembered at all. It’s another to ponder the absence of memory. It’s much like the adage about multiple deaths: one is physical, one is when the last person who knew you dies, and the third is when your name is forgotten. If we suffer the third death collectively as a species, that is a reason to be gloomy.
But we can take a page from our rat cousins and their ability to overcome obstacles. We don’t need to fade into total obscurity. We have the technology to leave a message that could last for 60 million years or more. At this timescale, it’s possible we could pass along a message to a future, independently evolved species capable of understanding it. According to ChatGPT, laser engraved diamonds, sealed in a titanium chamber, could possibly last 60 million years. I suggested putting the container on the moon in a dormant lava tube. If a future species can make it to the moon, they should be willing to decipher what we leave for them there. It would be nice to leave them more than moon footprints, which themselves might last 100 million years.
In my way, I’m only avoiding “The End” for awhile longer. There’s no way to predict if another intelligent species like us would ever evolve anyway. We simply don’t have the data. The titanium capsule is little more than a message in a bottle thrown into an ocean.
Still, the shift in our approach could be helpful. Currently we have many of the richest people in the world scheming and building and investing in order to avoid the end of the world. Much of what they’re doing is based on their self-assessment that they can predict the future. They can’t. Even so, they justify the suffering of millions today so that (in their view) trillions can have a better future. It is this view that led Elon Musk to try and get the US government so that we would have more resources for interplanetary travel.
This sort of thinking seems short-sighted and petty when placed in the larger context we are looking at here. It makes me think it’s even more likely whoever would find such a record tens of millions of years from now is going to be descended from rats, not us. So the next time you see a rat, after the initial reaction, remember they were here before us. They might also be our only link to whoever may know we were here at all.