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Jon Stewart's 'Earth': Everything An Alien Tourist Needs To Know About The Planet After Human Beings Are Gone (PHOTOS)

Posted: 09-21-10 07:08 AM


It’s funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated world wide as perhaps man’s greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon’s desolate landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we took her for granted and treated her like shit. So welcome to Earth… population, you.


Life’s bottom line was this: Every living creature fought like hell to stay that way. We found antibiotics to kill bacterial diseases, at which point those diseases just figured out a different way to start killing us. Earth’s creatures were in a constant, ever-changing strategic battle for the upper hand. Except spiders, who never quite found a counter for the rolled-up magazine. But as they say, “That’s life.”


The fear of death and the terrifying uncertainty of existence prompted early man to seek comfort, or at least assurance, in the supernatural. “Who created us?” “How does the sun travel through the sky?” “Why does it burn when I pee?” For millennia, the respective answers to those questions were “Invisible Cloud Men,” “star-boats,” and “you must have angered the Invisible Cloud Men.”


Religion helped overcome man’s catastrophic tendency toward neighborliness and smoothed the way for millennia of wars – allowing millions of people to discover, first-hand, whether or not their religion was right about the whole “post-death non-oblivion” thing. To sum up: Religion provided great comfort to a world torn apart…by religion.


In some ways, mankind was incredibly diverse. We liked to say that each person was like a snowflake: Unique, precious, and sooner or later covered in exhaust and dog urine. Yet all of our lives all traced roughly the same arc from beginning to end, and passed through roughly the same milestones. It was a process we called the life cycle, because it reminded us of a popular stationery exercise bike that was exhilarating but grueling, and wound up leaving you off exactly where you started.

Excerpted from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart presents EARTH (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart. Copyright 2010, by Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/jon-stewarts-earth_n_731916.html [with comments]

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also e.g. (items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32752849 (and preceding and following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=30821328

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39765970 and following