The Owners of Earth

The world does not belong to humans, humans aren’t even humans.

We, or at least most people, like to have the comfortable mindset and belief, or faith, that the world is dominated by humans, but they couldn’t be more wrong. But before I get to who actually controls the world, let me tell you that humans aren’t humans. Not a single “person” or even “animal” you see or talk to is what they appear to be. Every single animal on this planet is composed of less than half of themselves. Can you imagine it? If I have a company but I own only 49% of its shares, I don’t actually own it, it belongs to the entity that holds the other 51%. And the human body is the same, your mushy brain thinks it owns that sack of flesh, blood and bones, but it has less than half of the shares. The ones who actually own most of the shares of the human body are the many colonies of bacteria living inside and outside every single person.

The human body, and animal bodies, have more bacterial cells as human/animal cells! You are not a person, you are a building, and you aren’t even the owner! The colonies of bacteria own you, and it doesn’t just stop there. Do you think it is you who has all the thoughts, feelings, fears, excitement, passion? Do you think it is your brain telling you to go get that sugary-fatty treat in the middle of the night? Well, sorry to disappoint you, but plenty of those so-called feelings and cravings are actually triggered by the bacteria living inside of you, sending signals to your body and brain, demanding something with extra urgency on top.

I think that by now, dear reader, if you are on the internet, you have heard of serotonin, something kind of critical for moods, sleep, and the overall functioning of a good mind. Well, that’s not yours either. It is just one of the many ways that the bacteria inside of you, more specifically inside your gut, have created to control this thing you call body and mind, to get what they want, just like little tenants of a building staging some kind of protest to get the AC turned on.

And there’s more! You are also a virus! About 8% of the human genome is composed of viral DNA, and guess what, without this viral DNA, no human could ever be born, because it is an ancient viral gene that does the hard work of creating the placenta.

But enough about the not-so-human body. How about the planet?

With just the arguments above, I think I already have a winning case proving that humans don’t control anything, bacteria do the controlling. But let’s talk a bit about insects as well.

It is estimated, because no one in their right mind would count every single little critter one by one, but it is estimated that planet Earth has about 10 quintillion insects alive at any given time. I am not very good at math, but I guess that 10 quintillion is a few orders of magnitude bigger than 8 billion puny little humans.

And you would think that humans are smart, we evolved, created agriculture and farms. Ants and termites can do farming too, give it some time and they will start some religious wars among themselves as well. And this thing we call civilization and culture, with rules and regulations, that some people proudly say was invented by humans? Nope, ants already had civilizations waaaay before humans started gathering in small groups, this civilization thing is kind of a common path if you want to survive and progress, there’s no need to have a big thinking brain to create a civilization, evolution and selection take care of that alone.

And we all know, through history and through living it just a few years ago, that if some bacteria or viruses decide they don’t need humans anymore, bye-bye, we would never be able to retaliate.

Insects and bacteria, the true owners of Planet Earth, good for them, nobody cares and tomorrow is Monday.