一个星球,一次实验(1)

30 GOOD-BYE In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke

were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia , Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages,

a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.

There, some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave.

Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don't know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo,

so we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time.

You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction,

for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight, it is reported,