My Buddy regularly hurls the word “tribal” at me as though I am guilty of being like everybody else – loyal to the people like me. I’ve given this lot a of thought. First I’ll be evasive. Yes, I’m tribal and my tribe is humanity and humanity as it exists today before we tamper with it too much. Will we become genetically engineered in the coming eons? Will we become bionically and computationally augmented? Will we become both and or something more amazing as we spread ourselves through the Milky Way. When, in a billion years, our galaxy crashes into Andromodea will our descendents, as remote from us as we are from the single celled thingies that began our journey a billion years ago be at peace among themselves or will we have a cosmic Star War going on? Will there be life on Andromeda with its own civilizations to contend with the Milky Way?
Well we on the Milky Way have a billion years to prepare for that if we don’t tear each other apart before the collision. Maybe our descendents will be some sort of cyborg that would be imposbile for primitive old me to find very agreeable.
And speaking of Earthly cyborgs this summer I have been in conflict with a nest of hornets which settled behind the eves of my house. I tried to poison them six or seven weeks ago by pumping an insecticide in the single hole they use to enter and exit. They soldiered on and multiplied but I didn’t give them much thought again until a couple weeks ago when Alanna Oswald and her daughter visited. Alanna’s daughter got stung and I decided something needed to be done.
A few days ago I bought another can of insecticide and shot it in the entrance several times over several days. It didn’t put a dent in the hornets although they refused to alight near their tunnel until the area around the hole was dry. I swear there must have been fifty hornets buzzing near by waiting for the air to clear so that they could carry bits of dead bugs to the nest. I couldn’t help but wonder how much biomass hundreds and possibly thousands of hornets were hauling into my house under the eves every day. Yesterday I fashioned a nine foot spear from with a marshmallow skewer tip. I rolled up a paper towel over the skewer and drenched it with insecticide and jammed the poisoned towel into the entrance. I kept squirting insecticide for two days on the hornets who tried to get back in. I’ll wait to remove the towel and caulk the hole for a couple weeks until I’m sure the remnants inside have canibalized each other into extinction.
This could almost be a set piece for Independence Day except that in this case I have superior weapons to the cyborgs. I am not sympathetic to hornets. I watched a Nova or a National Geographic program a decade ago about Hawaii which showed how invasive hornets are eating their way through Hawaii’s native insect population. I hope that’s not the fate of the Milky Way. Call me tribal.
