Prolog - "Spark of Light" by an Old Friend...

Pic. 1: Earth

...In space Earth seems a cool gleaming blue pearl, a CGI trick on a darkened set, and from a distance one might never imagine that it is alive...

...I was looking at pictures of the Earth from a distance, when I received an email from Scalino... Perhaps this won’t fit into the story genre itself but I’d like to share it anyway, because I applied Scal’s questions in real time to what I was thinking about...

- Who is the teller of the story here?

History, or intelligence, or me, depending on how you look at it...

- Who is the observer of the events? Who is/are the main character(s) involved in the events?

All life capable of observing and interacting has been a part of this particular story...

- The date / the place / the area...?

…The spark of light first appeared in the sea almost four billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an emergence of life taking millions of years, nature’s first multi-cellular organisms began to multiply wildly, and then it stopped...

...Around 450 million years ago a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet leaving the vast oceans decimated and empty. Slowly plants began to evolve, then insects, only to be wiped out in the second great mass extinction upon the earth...

...The cycle repeated again and again, reptiles emerging independent of the sea only to be killed off, then dinosaurs struggling to life along with the first birds and flowering plants; their destruction –possibly by meteorite strikes and/or volcanoes, earth’s fourth and fifth great extinctions...

...Against the odds, again and again, life emerged and struggled towards entelechy. Only 100,000-400-000 years ago Homo Sapiens appeared. From cave paintings to books to nanomedicine and the ISS, humans have been a tireless force upon the earth and off, studying the natural world as it unfolds, working with intelligence and interaction to overcome the limitations of evolution itself, giving birth to people with minds like yours; bavarians, neurohackers, dreamers, creators, entrepreneurs and wanderers, who will carry it into the future; all descended from that original single cell, that first spark of life...

...Which brings me to Scalino’s other question...

- What did s/he learn from it?

...I learned that just out there in the wild, in some fraction of a second, some spark of light did change the predictable outcome of the event...