Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived two siblings; inseparable, like two cells that are scientifically impossible to separate. As time began to pass, the two siblings started drifting apart. One grew thicker, the other thinner. They had been raised differently, even though they were taught under the same ideology of evolution. Now, several millenniums later, one sibling envies the other, and wonders if it could be like the other.
I love a good fairytale. That was an attempt at trying to condense the four billion-year-long evolution process into a few lines that might’ve intrigued me when I was a kid. As a kid, plants had always fascinated me. Even though we do make our own food for survival, we know that we don’t actually make it on our own. Plants are the real heroes here. They make their own food. They harness natural resources and they make it. That’s what fascinated me about them.
Not for a million years have we ever shared a common ancestor with the plants. One thing we don’t weirdly seem to realize is that we’re doomed without plants. It takes a primary-school understanding of biology to comprehend our eventual doom: humans need oxygen. Plants make them. Non-vegetarians, take note: you can’t survive without them, either.
What if we didn’t need them, though? What if we could make our own food? For starters, we would stop exploiting natural ecosystems for agricultural resources, and let them diversify. Plants achieve photosynthesis by exposing their entire-plant body to the sun, and harnessing the sun’s energy in the process. Even if Chlorophyll wasn’t present in our body, there would be no way our entire body would be exposed to the sun, especially given how we seem to be the only species of mammals that loves attire; attire that isn’t a product of evolution.
Humans are the only known species to consume spicy food voluntarily. There is no concrete proof why we seem to enjoy it. It’s an acquired taste, we tell our animal friends. Acquired over millions of years of consuming, exploiting, and feeding off plants. We seem to enjoy it now. And that’s not the only kind of food we enjoy. We enjoy eating everything and everybody. Something we could never do if had the ability to perform photosynthesis.
What would happen to restaurant chains, one of the corner stones of capitalism? We would have green patches on our body, patches that we need to expose to the sun in order to prepare “food”. Therefore, there is no way we could hide these patches. Well, I sense patch-shaming, and patchists evolving with us if we choose to evolve in that direction.
Scientifically speaking however, there is no possible way by which photosynthesis will be possible; unless we artificially mutate and let genetics do its thing. Or we could let nature inspire us, and evolve in that direction.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)