When not busy trying to murder humans in
The Matrix, the AI program known as Agent Smith took time to pontificate on our nature as a species. You canât really consider us mammals, he reckoned, because mammals form an equilibrium with their environment. By contrast, humans move to an area and multiply âuntil every natural resource is consumed,â making us more like a kind of virus. âHuman beings are a disease,â he concluded, âa cancer of this planet. You are a plague.â
I think, though, that it would be more accurate to describe humanity as a kind of biofilm, a bacterium or fungus thatâs grown as a blanket across the planet, hoovering up its resources. We plop down great cities of concrete and connect them with vast networks of highways. We level forests for timber to build homes. We turn natural materials like sand into cement and glass, and oil into asphalt, and iron into steel. In this reengineering of Earth, weâve imperiled countless species, many of which will have gone extinct without science ever describing them.