The museum of failure

Sunday, 04 November, Year 4 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

- Did you salt this ?!
- Yes I did! And besides crab is a little salty anyway.

You know how some people never salt anything, so it's always an act of wonder if they actually make something which doesn't immediately and imperatively require ample salt shavings ? And then they ocasionally surprise you salting things properly ? Well... they don't surprise me cause I tend to taste first, but anyway.

The subject is crab, which indeed is a little salty naturally. Conceivably this would have to do with the poor animal spending its entire lifecycle inside brine, where it gets slowly marinaded. As it's a primitive life form and as such doesn't have any access to advanced tech like for instance skin, or kidneys, it wouldn't surprise if it were a little salt-leaky. If slowly but surely a little salt made its way inside. After all, the creature has to fight certain osmotic pressure day in, day out.

Now imagine that somewhere in this big wide Universe there's the god or master creator race or whatever, that purposefully built all or maybe just part of it, but at any rate life. And they keep somewhere a museum of all the many attempts that structurally failed. Because obviously life is a stochastic process, which is just another way of saying really really funny.

For instance, somewhere on a shelf there is the very old, primitive and by now extinct crab or maybe crab-like thingee which lived in the sea but for whom salt was poisonous. It was born through accident, a failed attempt at life on Earth (tho nobody knew that then much like nobody knows it about us yet, either). It hung out as best it could, eking a meagre existence submerged in an ocean of poison, and eventually it died out, overwhelmed by the entirely untenable "niche" it found itself occupying.

And you know this is exactly how it works, because the signs are all around us. Take cats : they really like fish, don't they ? But they really hate water, don't they ? That's exactly how it works, and the historical existence of the salt-intolerant protocrab is not a matter of conjecture. What's dubious is if anyone actually has it preserved in a museum somewhere, but not whether it actually existed.

Oh, and the question. Well... I wonder what else is in there. Don't you ?

Category: AICMF
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