As I flew into land at Brisbane Airport I looked out the little port hole they give us on the world outside. It struck me first how many more houses I saw coming into land at Brisbane than I did at Melbourne but then I noticed something weird about it: the houses all bunched together attached either to rivers or large roads looking like infections working out from a vein in a human. When I looked out the other side (the benefit of being in such a small aircraft, a 737 with only six seats across and a small aisle) I noticed a similar effect except with the sea. Lots of houses built on the beach side with gaps where ‘nature’ lived. As I progressed into the city the ‘infection’ became denser with the natural environment succumbing to the built.

The human disease isn’t something new and was in fact a part of Agent Smith’s soliloquy on his hatred of humanity and how the machines came to categorise them. When you consider what we do from a height offered by aircraft (itself destructive to the ecosystem below) you wonder how we are different in some ways to viral infections in human. I feel that at this point its really a macro versus micro argument: we has humans at the macro level destroy the earth which given the scale of the earth is really comparative to the scale down of humans to a virus. We haven’t quite learnt to spread to different heavenly bodies yet but we’re working on that problem already primitively reaching towards the moon. We’ll get the skills down pat as we evolve the ability to infect other planets just as we evolved the ability to rapidly move from continent to continent to exploit it (first with sea travel and then with air travel). Like most horrible viral infections we’re destroying our host, the Earth, at an increasing rate and hoping that we’ll be able to keep it alive just long enough to infect somewhere else. Time will tell.