My name is Cyano and I'm three and a half billion years old. With any luck I'll make it to the big ten billion when I'll get a telegram from The Cosmic Creator on the day of The Last Judgement. But I don’t think the same can be said for those so-called Sapiens who ruled the world for the blink of an eye around the time of my three and a half billionth birthday.  
 
It was like the Pond of Eden in The Beginning. Bluey, Greenie, Algy and I used to lie around in the warm sea, taking in the rays, doing a bit of photosynthesizing and blowing out some oxygen without a care in the world. We were prokaryotes and we ruled for one and a half a billion years. Then the eukaryotes muscled in, acting all superior. ‘Look at our nuclei’, they’d say, like they’d all had a classical education. And before you knew it, there was the Cambrian Explosion. Fish with legs climbing out of the shallows and colonising the beaches. ‘A land without critters for critters without land’, they’d say.  We watched an endless procession of flora and fauna as they lived and loved and died and were buried. That is where they’d still be resting in peace today if it weren't for getting dug up and burned by those pests around the time of my three and a half billionth birthday.   
 
The creatures that crawled out of the sea came to think of our home as the ‘Earth’. We think it should really be called ‘Sea’ or ‘Ocean’ or even just ‘Water’. Come to that, the land creatures are mostly water themselves. They forget that.  Maybe they should have stayed in the water all along. As it was, only one in ten made it through the Great Permian Dying. After that, the dinosaurs ruled the world for about 200 million years but then they too were wiped out 65 million years ago. That was just at the time when some new little furry creatures appeared. They had worried, inquisitive faces and whiskers quivering all the time as they poked around in the twilight, keeping out of the way of the birds and reptiles. Very clever they were, with their warm blood and live young.  
 
About five million years ago, down in the Olduvai Gorge in Africa, a super clever monkey called Lucy was born. It was the end of the Miocene when there were rainforests with plenty of trees for monkeys to hide in and keep away from the sabre-toothed cats. But then came the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, which were dry as a dustbowl. The trees withered away, leaving only savannah and nowhere for Lucy and her mates to hide when the big cats got hungry. They always hunted the slowest and most vulnerable, which was usually the woman who was heavily pregnant and could not run very fast.   
 
It was sad to see Lucy and her women friends getting eaten whenever they were about to have a baby. Bluey, Greenie, Algy and I thought they wouldn’t last long on this Earth, which was a relief in a way because there had been a grim prophecy that they would evolve into the most rapacious and destructive animal ever. It was foretold that they would overrun the world and there’d be hardly any wild animals left. We didn’t believe the prophecy, though. We reckoned Lucy and the Sapiens family would soon get hunted to extinction. 
 
The End, we thought.  
 
But it wasn’t. Somehow, with no credible way to survive in the savannah nor during one hundred thousand years when there were only thirteen hundred of them, survive they did. During this time, as well as losing their fur, they learned to speak and make fire. They lived in tribes of one to two hundred people and, while they were social, sociable and co-operative with others in their tribe, they could be cruel and vicious towards anyone in a different tribe.   
 
It’s a mystery to Bluey, Greenie, Algy and me. We don’t have sex. We don’t have culture or morality. Everything runs on instinct and there is no fuss. Whereas the Sapiens family are so clever that they have lots of sex and culture and morality. But they don’t seem clever enough to work out if they are innately selfish, greedy bastards or nice, kind, caring folk. I reckon they are innately empathic and caring folk because their babies are born at least one year premature – some say twenty-five years premature, but they exaggerate – and if it weren’t for the mother and father and the rest of the tribe devoting years of care to their infants, the lot of them would have died out in a generation.   
 
The Sapiens certainly loved their children and they looked after their elders too. But they weren’t the same with most of their neighbours. About two thousand years ago there was a man who told them to love one another as they loved themselves. But hardly any of them listened. Instead, most of them carried on taking what they could from their neighbours as well as from the land and sea around them.  
 
Well, I’m planning to be here for another six billion years or so, which is until the sun turns into a red giant so vast that it will encompass our tiny blue dot of a watery planet and The Cosmic Creator will pronounce The Last Judgement. But I don’t rate the chances of the Sapiens family lasting till then.  They’ll probably take most of the rest of life down with them as they die out and it’ll be back to Bluey, Greenie, Algy and me bathing in the warm seas again. The End. Really.

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