>You mean, humans, right? As George Carlin put
>it, the Earth will be fine. It'll just shake us off like dandruff.
>
>Dennis
And Stephen Jay Gould says it's always been the Age of Bacteria:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html
[....]
If we must characterize a whole by a representative part, we certainly should honor life's constant mode. We live now in the "Age of Bacteria." Our planet has always been in the "Age of Bacteria," ever since the first fossilsbacteria, of coursewere entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.
On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria areand always have beenthe dominant forms of life on Earth. Our failure to grasp this most evident of biological facts arises in part from the blindness of our arrogance but also, in large measure, as an effect of scale. We are so accustomed to viewing phenomena of our scalesizes measured in feet and ages in decadesas typical of nature.
Individual bacteria lie beneath our vision and may live no longer than the time I take to eat lunch or my grandfather spent with his evening cigar. But then, who knows? To a bacterium, human bodies might appear as widely dispersed, effectively eternal (or at least geological), massive mountains, fit for all forms of exploitation and fraught with little danger unless a bolus of imported penicillin strikes at some of the nasty brethren. Consider just some of the criteria for bacterial domination:
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