Lives in the Balance

There are the few who make a difference and the many that do not. Station does not determine this distinction: There are the many among those in power who live and die insignificant and there are the few among the lowly who prove noteworthy.

In fiction the important characters never die or do so dramatically. Unimportant characters are slaughtered in droves and we are grimly amused no matter the body count. Reality is not so different.

In fiction a hero is loved for his heroism and a villain for his flair. The anonymous, even if granted token names, are entirely expendable whether supposedly good or bad. Reality is no different.

We celebrate our fictional heroes because they live and die for things worth fighting for. We enjoy our fictional masterminds for bothering to make evil interesting. We appreciate the slaughter of our fictional bystanders and cannon-fodder because their grim fate is the only thing that makes them interesting. Again, reality is no different.

Death of the Scarred Warrior

What if our science and religion are debased aspects of an older culture? Our “diversity” may very well be the strewn rubble of what was once a glorious civilization.

Suppose there were originally three habitable worlds in our solar system. What if the asteroid belt is the shattered remains of one of them? Mars was a moon of the hapless planet and was blasted and flooded by its destruction. The sudden waters receded only to be followed by a drought that never ends. The lush green of a living moon became the barren red of a barely habitable new planet. Only the hearty and resourceful survived to be Martians. Severity became a way of life. The World of War was born.

Suppose the humanity of prehistoric Earth and Mars were not so different than the humanity of today. Struggles for wealth and influence escalated into wars. Things got out of hand and weapons of mass-destruction were employed. Hyper-dimensional physics initiated a massive plasma bolt that tore open the atmosphere of Mars as it bore into the mantle and shorted the planet’s core. The Red Planet has been dead ever since. Earth survived but was devastated. Our prehistory has since become myth and legend.

Maybe, maybe not. Whatever happened occurred whether we know or believe or not. The "scarred warrior" of our old tales may very well be the telling of a history barely within our memory. The idea does not debunk our science and religion because our science and religion are the very things that give us the hint of what may have happened. Never fear to ponder.