Monday of a dry winter. Driest in California in five hundred years. That's a long time. That's back when the indians had the real estate. Fished, lived in the desert and the forests. Back when Ishi's people were a going concern. Don't know Ishi? Look him up. Last of his people. Caught in the foothills outise Oroville I believe in the late eighteen hundreds. Lived with an Anthropologist in San Francisco. Smart guy. Quite the celeb. But like his not so lucky kindred back east caught some White European disease his immune system had never been prepared for and gone. Ishi, the last of his tribe. Early dead. Final.

Lesson there? Maybe. We've dug around almost everywhere on Earth. Explored, exploited, excavated, disinterred the bones of the recent dead and the ancients. Nothing holy. Depending on your religion.
Found HIV in Africa. Something new thirty years ago. Piece of the genetic pie in monkeys we'd never encountered. Nasty disease. Oh, and unlike what you read, a universal killer. Not a gay disease.

Lots of plagues and diseases lurking around. Viruses. Bacteria. Many unknown, unaccounted for. And we think we've got the planet figured. Ours. Conquered. Yeah.

Lots of older societies thought that. Pompeiians, Incas, Aztecs, Romans, Celts, Trojans, Vikings, Han people, Black feet, Cherokee. Druids. Yup. All gods people. Children of the great spirit. Read on it. All thought they were the ones. Chosen. THE PEOPLE some of their societal names meant.

Some died out; disease, drought, famine, social collapse, but most got conquered. The OTHER god's people showed up and destroyed them. All prayers on deaf ears. No lightning, no intervention of the gods, no hammer strokes from Valhalla or Heaven, or the Seventh Ray. Nope. The invaders tromped through, crushed them to dust, burnt their temples, ground their bones to powder. And gone. Some tribes, cities, states, a thousand years old, most younger. Same end. Gone. Now just dust, a few ruins. Visigoths to Greeks, Turkoman to Mongols hordes. Big kingdoms and small. Great and humble. Now, just a page in a history book, or some whole books, sets of books. Not much of a mark.

Latin was the language of the world once. You speak Latin? Write it? Neither does anyone else. Dead language they call it.

Lesson? Well, maybe it's that whether microbes or a better arrow, any society, ANY civilization can go at any time. Some last a long time, some short, but they all go.

Oh, and those viruses I spoke of earlier? They mutate. Like Ebola. Little shuffling of its DNA and big mass die off. Airborne? Oh, yes, lots of ruins, lots of broken pots and hollow eyed ghost towns. Maybe all?

No worries though. Look around. Everything is solid, steady, last forever. Yeah. Until it doesn't.

No need to stay awake about it. Probably nothing. No mutations, or better spears or lurking microscopic cooties to lay us low. Naw.

Remember the nitwit babbling about the thousand year reich? What's his name? Yeah, his boots rang on granite too. Big Ideas. Oh, he was a monster, a madman, period. Mass killer of millions. Kind of a human version of Ebola. Just a little Viennese microbe, nobody, Corporal in World War One. Got gassed. Lived. Broke artist with some half baked ideas. Jail time. Nobody. But somehow, that little thing, that one bad human apple, he mutated, spread, sucked others into his sphere. Human plague. Interesting analogy.

Killed seventy five million humans according to the latest theories. Way up from the original fifty five millions at an earlier count. Human disease. Makes you wonder. Bin Laden? another microbe? Small killer comparably. What, maybe ten, twenty thousand? What about the Korean microbe? He's over there mutating right now. Makes me wonder on either a micro or macro scale what's brewing?

Easy to suck on that death apple, huh? Go to that dark place. Think destruction and apocalypse. Humans been singing that song for millennia. Heck, whole religions based on it. THE END of days.

Me? believe it or not, I'm an optimist. A true believer. We'll beat the odds. Disease, despots, disfunction, and disaster. Yup. Beat them all. I think we'll go to the stars. Populate the galaxy. Yes. Look around. We've fumbled and bumbled a long way from rock throwers to astronauts. And the death makers and doom sayers have been along for the whole ride. But, here we are.

So, mixed message today? I suppose. Humanity is a mixed message. Noble and vile, numinous and  venal, brilliant and stupid. But, so far so good. Kind of.

Got to watch those microbes though. Big ones and little ones. Yeah. Sometimes they mutate on a moments notice.

Me? I'm breathing deep. Great faith in the infinitude of the cosmos. Yeah. Trillions of suns, billions of planets. Man, what a time to be alive. First AI's about to come online. Maybe ten years. Artificial Intelligences. Self changing computers? You bet. Self driving cars, direct neural connects to the cyber worlds. Gonna happen folks. Quicker than you think.

I had a preacher tell us, his congregation, back when the first manned ship was on its way to the moon, that God would never allow humans to touch it. The moon. Put there in the firmament to light the sky. Bible said so, he said. We did touch it. Went there repeatedly. Not enough. But, we'll be back.

Preacher? He got his by a dump truck.

But, If you think I'm trying to tell you what any of that means, you are mistaken. I don't know.

Changes coming. Big ones. Biggest in history. Faster, more unimaginable than anything before it. Next twenty years. Keep breathing. Yeah.