Jay Rothermel’s Reviews > Sad Planets > Status Update

Necrobiome

“Necrobiome” is the name given to that community of critters which come together in the shared mission of metabolizing a corpse. When an organism dies, uninvited survivors descend on the unplanned wake and feast on the remains: everything from lions, vultures, crows – down the chain of complexity – to worms, beetles, fungi, and “waves of bacteria.” The necrobiome is thus a temporary society....

....it’s tempting to think regretfully of our fellow humans as stars in this sense. Even as someone nods hello – or simply saunters by in the street, without noticing us at all, like a shooting star – we have the morbid feeling that they are already deceased, and we are just seeing the belated signals of their fleeting existence.

A wonderfully lachrymous series of mini-essays about the end of the world.

“There is no Planet B,” insist the ecological activists. And of course they are right. But the pedantic astronomers will remind us that there is Planet 442b, which enjoys the right conditions to sustain liquid water and is even one-and-ahalf billion years younger. No matter that we will never be able to figure out how to travel....