The Last Elephant

Copyright © October 7, 2005, August 13, 2006 - Howard E. Johnson - Leesburg, Indiana - (hjdisrelief6813 HTML)

This is a basic premise of the essay that is in process of expansion. Suggestions and criticisms are always encouraged and solicited.

For twenty-five years the excess Muslim population overran Europe and destroyed the European economy. With Europe’s economy over taxed, they began expanding into already stressed India and China resulting in wars and great devastations there. During the same period, the excess Central and South American population swamped America and destroyed the US and Canadian economies, crippling the food producing agriculture soon after it failed to keep up with the rapidly growing demands of the expanding population of the US. World demands on a severely injured food, health, transport, and security system also broke down completely. The unchecked expansion of human habitat into all remaining wild environments resulted in the decimation of all wildlife.

During this expansion, most national parks, nature preserves, wildlife sanctuaries were overrun and the native habitat destroyed. Wild animals everywhere were slaughtered for human food, particularly after over fishing wiped out all of the ocean fisheries. In Africa, the last elephant was slaughtered for food on January 22, 2030. The last tree in the Amazon rain forest fell on April 30, 2033. By this time, all trees on the earth had fallen to provide heat and or shelter for increasingly desperate humans. By the end of the year, 2050, all large prey and domestic animals had been killed for food and there remained only dwindling supplies of rabbits, rats, mice and insects. Starvation and lawlessness now ruled the entire globe and murder and cannibalism had become the major activities for the remaining human population. (This happened in every previous complete societal collapse on the planet.)

With so much of the earth’s surface denuded of vegetation, greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere held the radiant heat from the sun previously captured by vegetation and turned into carbohydrates. Over the next few centuries, this resulted in a major rise of global atmospheric and ocean temperatures causing the atmosphere to carry increasing amounts of water as vapor while remaining cloud free. This water vapor added to the greenhouse effect causing the atmosphere and oceans to warm to the point where life as we know it could no longer exist. As the earth heated and dried, the remaining vegetation was consumed in huge fires that raged over the planet burning everything and using up atmospheric oxygen. As millions of years of photosynthesis was quickly reversed, atmospheric oxygen combined with the remains of dead life and soon was virtually eliminated.

The air now consisted of the following gasses in decreasing order of their volume: nitrogen, methane, water, carbon dioxide, argon and trace gasses including a tiny amount of oxygen. In time the outer layers of the atmosphere cooled to the point where clouds began to form in the previously cloudless skies. Within a short time the earth was completely shrouded with clouds which reflected the sun’s energy and allowed the atmosphere to slowly cool once more.

The earth had effectively been sterilized of all life except primitive forms including cyanobacteria which thrive in such conditions and are one of the earliest types of bacteria. Fossil evidence indicates that these bacteria existed approximately 3.3 billion years ago and were the first oxygen producing evolving phototropic organisms. They are responsible for the initial conversion of the earth’s atmosphere from an anoxic (state without oxygen) to an oxic (with oxygen) state. Being the first to carry out oxygenic photosynthesis, they were able to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen playing a major role in oxygenating the atmosphere. In a relatively short geological instant the earth had returned to the state it was in more than three billion years ago before life so altered the environment with photosynthesis.

Question: Do you think life would once more evolve as it had, and if so, would it take completely new forms, orders, phylum etc. until, once more, a dominant species arose that once again destroyed all life? For you Biblical types, wasn’t it prophesied that the next time, after the flood, humanity would be destroyed by fire and nothing would be left?