If you think of life on Earth as a game board, it’s clear why most of us enjoy playing. Damn, but life’s good on this familiar, nurturing planet! The pounding surf; the way flowers smell, and lovers, too; the flickering silhouettes of coconut tree leaves, and those cotton-candy-clouds at sunset, drifting under a blue violet background…

And the food’s pretty good here, too!

Our revered though occasionally-sacrificed ancients figured out what humans could safely eat, and from there, it just kept getting better and better! What an ensemble of herbs and overtones in skillets sizzling with diversity! And the music, the architecture, the pageantry – it all just kept getting more colorful, and more … seductive!

It was like we’d seen it in a movie and we just went with it, who wouldn’t?  But Jesus, then we started pretty much ignoring and wiping out all other species as the party raged on. (“Hunh? How’d that happen?”) Okay, here’s the way I see it: although this particular game board may be a launching pad for even more legions of marching, twisted broomsticks, maybe that’s what happens when a species just recently in peak bloom got recklessly self-absorbed, and now has to draft a desperate army to battle back its own, obstinate ways of thinking.

Anyway, I digress. Compared to a wind-whistling afternoon on Mars, we lucked out, no lie. We don’t really want to delete all the work that’s been done in the last few billion years, do we?