On a long road trip with my family, we saw many fields full of giant metal blades spinning in the air. My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter asked me, “What are those?”
“Bird choppers,” I explained to her. “We put up large blades in big fields to kill and chop up birds as they fly by.”
“We don’t like birds?” she asked.
“Oh no; we hate them. They do nothing but squawk and poop on things. That’s why we go to such great effort to build these fields of death and kill them in mass quantities.” I studied the spinning blades for a moment. “They’d probably kill more birds if they spun faster. They really should build a coal plant here and provide more power to these things.”
When we got home, I decided to research these bird choppers and find out why they haven’t built more of them in the flight path of the Canada Geese (I hate those things). I discovered something alarming: They aren’t bird choppers at all. They’re called wind turbines and are meant to generate electricity, and the fact that they chop up eagles is unintentional, and people want to prevent that.
There are a lot of stupid things going on here. First off, why do we care about eagles? They’re supposed to have great eyesight but apparently can’t see hundred-foot, moving blades. And it’s not like eagles help us in any way. They don’t vote or pay taxes or pick lettuce for below minimum wage — they’re completely useless to us.
The second stupid thing is this idea of wind power. I’m sure that was a neato idea hundreds of years ago, and there’s probably some issue of Popular Science from the 12th century with a picture of a windmill on the cover, accompanied by a headline proclaiming, “Man will now have nothing but leisure time, as wind will do all his work!” But people soon found that wind was useful for little more than grinding grain, similar to how we never found much use for solar power beyond cheapo calculators. I don’t know why someone thought to bring back wind power now — I guess it seemed like a cutesy idea to turn all that wind blowing around into electricity — but as soon as someone said, “Now, all we need to do is build tons of 30-story metal structures,” someone else should have said, “This is already beyond stupid. Let’s just stick to tiny, simple-to-use coal.”
But the dumbest part isn’t that we’re worried about the eagles or trying to get electricity from wind — it’s the reason they’re building these wind turbines. People want “green” power that doesn’t harm the environment. That’s why they seem so alarmed that despite their good intentions toward the environment, they’re slicing up birds mid-flight. It doesn’t surprise me, though, because I know a fundamental rule: Nature is our enemy, and everything we do will always be in opposition to it.
Where did we get this idea that we need to save the environment? Has the environment ever tried to save us? No. Since the dawn of time, nature has tried to kill us. Earthquakes, plagues, sharknados — nature is always trying to find new ways to wipe us out. We have like no allies in it. Except the dog. And we have a U.S./Russia-type relationship with the cat. But other than that, basically everything out there — squirrels, salamanders, azalea bushes — wants us dead and would kill us all without a second thought if it could. And humanity has only survived because it can overcome nature. For instance, thousands of years ago, there were lions everywhere on all continents. Everywhere. If you went to the grocery store to buy some Froot Loops, a lion would be right there in the aisle, ready to tear you apart. But we defeated them — it ends up that a lion has no defense against a suplex — and now lions are mostly wiped out, and humans are everywhere.
In fact, humans are so powerful that we can now inflict great harm on nature. So it’s time for revenge, right? No. People want to “save the environment,” and that’s why we’re building stupid wind turbines instead of sensible things like powered bird choppers. We want to be nice to nature to stop that global climate warming change, but nature will not be nice back. All that warming is just another ploy from nature to try to kill us all. But it’s not going to work. We don’t care about a little warming, because we have air conditioning.
It’s time to stop pretending that nature will ever like us. Instead, we need to strike back against it. We need plans to eventually replace as much of nature as we can with robots. People worry about robots turning on humans, but we can program robots to like us. But even as you read this, there are ducks waddling around, thinking, “Kill all humans!”
And that’s how nature is; just because it isn’t very good at killing us now doesn’t mean it won’t get better. When the global warming doesn’t kill us off, nature will probably later try to freeze us out. And I’ll bet nature is hard at work in its underground evolution labs trying to come up with a new animal to take us on — like maybe some sort of gorilla with a bear head that has shark mouths for fists and is bulletproof, i.e., an armored, shark-fisted borilla. I mean, this is the same nature that came up with poisonous snakes, alligators, and honey badgers — it’s always working on new killing machines, and we can’t even imagine what it’s capable of.
Nature is our enemy and always will be. There is no appeasing it. Eventually we will destroy it, or it will destroy us. So let’s stop doing things like making fields full of giant metal blades unless we’re going to use them to chop up Canada Geese in flight. I really hate those things.
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