Then in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart.They both shot the birds, and that was the last that was ever seen of Bachman's warblers.The impulse to exterminate was by no means exclusively American.In Australia, bounties were paid on the Tasmanian tiger (properly the thylacine), a doglike creature with distinctive "tiger" stripes across its back,until shortly before the last one died, forlorn and nameless, in a private Hobart zoo in 1936.Go to the Tasmanian Museum today and ask to see the last of this speciesthe only large carnivorous marsupial to live into modern times―and all they can show you are photographs.The last surviving thylacine was thrown out with the weekly trash.I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos,to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it.As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
