Paradise is real, and it’s a planet out there, where everyone is safe. Listen.

I’m going to run wild with a hypothetical science idea that’s very close to me and breaks my heart, and fills me with hope at the same time. But I truly believe it’s possible, somewhere out there in the universe. It’s grounded in one basic fact everyone knows, the food chain, and one weird fact:

Let’s begin.

Life on this planet has been brutal for a long time. We call it a food chain, ecosystems — it’s really a beautiful green warzone, with every living thing spending it’s life hunting, killing, and eating other things to survive. Or spending their entire lives being hunted, scared, running for their lives, even their holy moments of childbirth an opportunity for a predator to eat a newborn, helpless animal.

Watch any nature documentary, and you’ll see many predators have the strategy of going after newborn animals, or unhatched eggs, or very young animals that have been cut off from the herd. Monstrous, right?

What was the youngest animal that was killed for meat you ate recently? Could it have been a baby animal?

Don’t forget, we are the all you can eat buffet greedy omnivore monsters of this planet. No matter how far from the death you are, you pay for it all the same by buying your food.

What hope was there ever going to be for a planet like this? It was always fucked. Evil was a fundamental part of it’s foundations, a part of it’s molecular structure. And you couldn’t even blame any animal (except us), because starving to death is horrific. That’s an endless cycle of everything eating everything else, a war where every species has it’s mass-murderers and victims biologically assigned. And if they don’t go to war, or don’t run like hell, they either starve and their children starve, or they get eaten alive.

Obvious stuff. Feel free to yawn. I’m not just trying to preach animal rights ideology at you — these are just the facts of life. The cage of violence everything on this planet is trapped in. I have a point. Bear with me, I’m getting there.

The only animals with their hands relatively clean of blood are the herbivores, eating exclusively plants. Non-intelligent, unfeeling plants, with no families or mates or children. But, of course…herbivores get eaten the most. Eating plants means they’ve got the most healthy solar energy storied in their bodies, see, because they’re eating from the source. Better for us. Defenseless animals anyway, relatively speaking. No hunting intincts, see?

As linked above, a virus, carried by ticks, was discovered recently that can make you allergic to eating red meat. Let’s ignore for now the delicious possibilities of weaponizing that virus and aiming it at meat-eating cultures that military research branches might think of in future, or the current internet meme joke of the first blood of the war between vegetarians and the rest of the planet being struck.

Let’s imagine. A planet, an alien world out there somewhere, where an alien version, or multiple versions, of this virus exists.

Imagine if there was a plague, an epidemic of this virus, killing all the carnivores and omnivores, leaving only the herbivores and maybe omnivores that slowly evolved to be herbivores only. Or imagine this virus developing at such an early stage in the development of life that barely any carnivores are created on this planet, and they die out.

A world of peace. A world without killing. A world where every meal doesn’t begin with a murder. A world where all you have to do to survive is visit a lake by a forest, drink deep, and graze on leaves.

What need for war? What need for having the biological urge, built by evolution and environment over centuries, to systematically learn how to kill everything you meet that isn’t one of your people, like we humans do?

What would a species that’s got all that free time and easy nutrition do? What amazing things could a SOCIETY of these beings accomplish, if their minds evolved that far?

Can you imagine how low the homicide rates among a herbivore intelligent species would be among their people?

Did you know that cats, on our world, sometimes eat their own young? Other animals too. Now imagine a world where that never has to happen, where it would not only be unthinkable, considered the ultimate evil, but where you would actually be physically allergic to eating any living thing.

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking typical things like I’m just going off an a wild science fiction, unsubstantiated theory. But the pieces are all here. A virus aimed only at meat-eaters. Earth, a planet where herbivores get life-giving solar energy the quickest and most direct of all nonplant life. Hell, there could be completely different, extreme reasons why a planet would only contain herbivores, some dinosaur-type extinction level event that causes only herbivores to dominate. If there’s one phenomenon in the universe that only targets meat-eaters, there may be other phenomena that targets carnivores and omnivores specifically.

I can hear you now. Who are you, random writer on the internet, to waste my time with your random flights of imagination? Where are your studies, your data, your captured specimens as examples? Your proof is nowhere, your babbling sweet nothings.

I hate to use the celebrity quote effect to knock cognitive bias out of people’s minds to force open-mindedness, but it’s a great quote:

If you only work from what you know for sure, pretending that anything you haven’t directly experienced yet is completely false, you will never try anything new. You will never discover anything new. Unless you have lucky accidents, you need to imagine something that’s never been seen before, before you can go looking for it. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Going to the moon was a dream with no feasible way of doing it, once. Having robots on Mars was the stuff of fantasy. And the building blocks of a herbivore planet are already here, in front of us.

You might ask, okay, even if it’s possible a herbivore planet exists, what do I care? I’ll probably never see it. I won’t live there. I’m an omnivore, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

For me, personally, it helps. To know that out there is a better world, good from the start, free from our particular planet’s evils. To know a type of heaven is out there, enjoyed by other things, built better people than us, from birth. But it’s also heartbreaking, knowing I’ll probably never witness it, and I’ll definitely never be a part of it.

I realize it’s strange, to let such an abstract idea affect me so deeply. But how often do you find out that it’s possible that a near-absolute peace exists, that heaven is real somewhere and it’s existence is possible based on extrapolating from the physical evidence? Where violence is rare? Where suffering doesn’t come from other beings, where there is no hell made of other people. Where animals and intelligent beings have no reason to hurt each other.

Maybe we’ll never meet them, and they’ll never meet people like us. I don’t want our Murder World to infect their peace. I don’t want them to be forced to reel with disgust at the new concept of a planet tied together by endless strands of killing and eating families, eating whole generations of animals.

It’s a long ways off, and the brutality of food chains is still going to be a part of Earth for a long time to come, but maybe humans can approach herbivores’ level one day.

That article is about cultured/in vitro meat, meat grown from stem cells in a lab without a brain, or a mind, never having even been an alive, working animal at any point. No intelligence, no suffering, no bad emotions, no family ties. No suffering for anything, and guilt-free meals for us, and no feeling weird when you get pets.

Now, whether this is more ethical because we’ll (presumably) leave smart, thinking, feeling, family-creating animals alone, or is actually a horror show of us creating soulless animals who’s only purpose is to be brought into this world to be eaten by us is beyond me. I don’t know. It does feel creepy, making an empty shell, an imitation in the shape of an animal so we can enjoy eating something that isn’t healthy for us in large doses anyway. It’s like an insanely hyper-aggressive version of the pointless self-destructiveness of buying cancer-causing cigarettes for an entire lifetime. Except combined with an ethical trolley problem with 3 different tracks, and one of those tracks leads to either eating something that can cry and love, or creating life that we removed the soul out of so we could eat it.

Is it not killing if you made sure the animal was never alive and awake to begin with, and didn’t even have the capacity to be alive and awake? Or did making sure it didn’t have a mind just mean you assassinated it’s soul in the embryo stage?

Well, creepy overtones aside, I’ll pick eating the mindless over the truly alive.

See what I mean when I said it was all fucked to start with? All hope lies in the herbivore planet.

EDIT:

Due to the specific tones and complicated views expressed in this essay, and common misunderstandings of my views that are clearly my fault as a writer, let me clarify:

Most of this planet’s history is a billion-character drama of life, death, fleeing, and predating. Because that’s just how our biosphere is designed. I don’t need to blame the players (the animals) to hate the game.

(though i do blame us)