I AM SEX — FRIENDS, HUMANS, EARTHLINGS, LEND ME YOUR EARS

Hi, I am sex. I am around 2 billion years old. Nice to meet you 🙂

I am guessing you know me. Especially if you are a teenager or older, though many children also know about me these days. Good for them… or not.

Anyway, I am here to tell my story. I think it’s time I told my story, hopefully in a short and simple way. It’s really important that I do.

You know I am afraid. For the first time in my almost two billion of years of existence I am afraid. I look around myself… and what do I see: my existence, like yours, is under threat. I exist, if you exist, if life exists. I am not sure if many of you ever thought about that – I mean in a lot of places on my own planet I am not even mentioned mostly except in whispers – but I am life itself… almost… isn’t it? Which life – sentient or insentient, self-aware or instinctive, happy or unhappy, moral or immoral, good or evil – it doesn’t matter. Those distinctions, while obviously important to you given the amount of pages scrawled, speeches made, blood shed, time spent over them, don’t really matter to me; the world is a bit different if you see it from my eyes.

That’s why I want to tell my story to you humans, because I want to talk about what matters to me. I want to thrust myself in the public attention even if you try to ignore me except when trying to sell stuff to each other. I want to make you sit up and take notice of me. I know most of you take notice of me in your private thoughts quite regularly, – ten to twenty times a day if some researchers at Ohio State University are to be believed. You can’t help it, I am the most powerful drive in your instinct whether you like it or not, but I am not talking about that.

Or not only about that. Oh I am glad to be a part of your thoughts, or your bedroom, or any other place you choose to be amorous, I am, thank you very much. But my role on this planet is a bit more important than to just give you pleasure or make some cute babies for you. Don’t get me wrong, I like human babies, I adore them, I keep making them all over the planet and will keep doing so till your species exists. You are after all – by some reasonable definitions – the pinnacle of evolutionary development, the pinnacle of my achievement. My job however is a bit egalitarian; it doesn’t stop with you. I got to make babies for most of the species most of the time, and do it well enough so the species survive and evolve.

Which brings me back to the point why I am talking to you – why you? Well, for better or for worse, you are the only species on this planet that has developed written languages and can read a book – like this one. You are the only species that can do math, discover laws of physics, do experiments to figure out the age of the universe, hold conversations with God who doesn’t seem to have any work except have conversations with you, write sonnets, create symphonies, decipher genetic codes, spread rumours with the help of the internet about that close friend you secretly hate and conjure exquisite torture devices like the Iron Maiden to convince your gullible fellow humans into thinking how horribly cruel your ancestors were. You can do all that. Oh, and you can also think of romantic stories that pit imaginary creatures who drink animal blood against imaginary creatures who drink your blood and make female teenagers of your species cry buckets of tears. Pretty impressive I must say.

You see you have amazing powers, powers that evolution – the only thing more important for life than me – has not given to any other species on this planet, at least yet. More than that, the sum of all the gifts evolution has bestowed on you has given you the power to shape the events on this planet in extraordinary ways, the power to even decide the future course of life on this planet.

(To Be Continued