We Are Not Low Creatures - by Erik Hoel

This is what I have been thinking this week. Even though humanity often does, at its worst, act as low creatures. Some act like vultures, cackling over the dead. Or snakes, who strike to kill without warning, then slither away. Or spiders, who wait up high for victims, patient and hooded and with the blackest of eyes. But as a whole, I still believe that we are not low creatures. We must not be low creatures. We simply need something to help us remember. An arrow-shaped rock on Mars, only a few feet across, and found sitting at the bottom of an ancient dried-up river, helped me remember. For, on Wednesday, and therefore lost amid the news this week, a paper was published in Nature. It was the discovery that—arguably for the first time in history—there are serious indications of past life on Mars. Specifically, these “leopard spots” were analyzed by the rover Perseverance. According to the paper, these spots fit well with mineral leftovers of long-dead microbes. Minerals like these, pro

This is what I have been thinking this week. Even though humanity often does, at its worst, act as low creatures. Some act like vultures, cackling over the dead. Or snakes, who strike to kill without warning, then slither away. Or spiders, who wait up high for victims, patient and hooded and with the blackest of eyes. But as a whole, I still believe that we are not low creatures. We must not be low creatures. We simply need something to help us remember. An arrow-shaped rock on Mars, only a few feet across, and found sitting at the bottom of an ancient dried-up river, helped me remember. For,