Monday 5 May 2008

Entry 6: in which One reflects on bacteria and intelligence

Many of the planets have cooled now. Several of them have bacteria developing nicely, and we're only, what, about 4 billion years into this cycle? Not bad.

Now I have to confess I have a weakness for bacteria. Or "slime" as Mrs God refers to them in the collective – a slime of bacteria. Does have a sort of ring to it I suppose; I think I’ll adopt it.

Slime does all sorts of interesting things to a planet - obviously lots more entertaining chemistry, atmosphere, temperature, even its colour. Trouble is, it doesn’t always stay that way. Every now and then the slime sort of gets together with itself and you get complex organisms developing. Worse, you occasionally have the evolution of what one might laughingly call intelligence.

Show me a planet with intelligence and I’ll show you a planet that’s about to disappear up its own sphincter. Oh, and they always end up inventing religion, often not long before "the end" as it were. Quelle surprise! Fortunately the universe is a big place. Seriously big. Definitely as big as - oh, I don't know - a very big thing. So you can pretty well ignore these minor anomalies and they disappear down the back of the sofa as it were.

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