Dentists, gone

August 2023

One day, from somewhere - the general direction was from space - aliens - what can they be called but that - descended to Earth. They didn't really come in droves, but they came suddenly and simultaneously all around the globe. A complete surprise, like the one that was the arrival of Martians in The War of the Worlds, and a complete takeover of the whole planet in a matter of hours, at most of days in a handful of places that managed somehow to put up a short-lived resistance.

When the giant lens-like objects (much like the common depiction of flying saucers from various sci-fi contexts, only without any antennae or other protrusions) started descending in swarms, even though humans didn't know what these were, their first reaction was armed defensive action. But there was not much to be done. The alien spaceships had the upper hand throughout, any attempt of attack on them was promptly subdued, seemingly without much effort. Fighter jets harassing them, missiles and rockets aimed at them were bounced off by an invisible shield, or often simply disappeared as if gone to another dimension or pulverized without much trace of remains. The subjugation was inevitable and swift.

What exactly drove them to Earth and what were their intentions was yet unclear, but at least by then we will have invented the yellow Babel fish and so language was no obstacle - we understood the Titans and they understood us. Titans - with individuals sporting a frame 15 meters in height and weighing 20 tons, their name surely was an apt description of their manifestation. Humans could at least find solace in the conclusion that our own evolution must have been apparently following a universally ideal path, since these Titans that came from a whole another galaxy were oddly similar to us in outward appearance (bar the striking difference in size). Two-legged, a muscular body, two upper limbs with five fingers each, head sitting on a strong neck, a face with a pair of eyes, a Greek nose, ears and mouth. When regarded from the vantage point of a human inhabitant standing at their feet, their body seemed to stretch up forever and the head seemed so far away that it was already apparently shrinking towards the top and the angles of contours were getting distorted, like the apparent straight-line curving around the horizon.

Other than the takeover, it turned out that the Titans took upon themselves to play a benevolent role on this planet, if that can reasonably be said given the circumstances. Their intentions slowly began to take shape. Apparently, a big part of their motivation to come to Earth was that they needed workforce for some project that demanded hand labor. A large proportion of human individuals older than 18 were obliged to work in Titan factories that sprung up all around the world, 10 hours per day, 6 days a week. Apart from that, everybody was free to pursue a life of their own design (bar plotting an insurrection) and the Titans went quite a stretch to make sure humans were fed, healthy and felt relatively OK. So that was our new reality, life in a sort of experiment, brought upon us from outside and without any real chance to escape from it.

In time it seems the Titans' needs for human labor grew and so they decided to retrain certain human occupations to work in their factories. They thought hard and decided that the first to be retrained shall be tailors. They saw this population as particularly qualified due to its dexterity and they reasoned that since the entire humanity can easily get dressed even without bespoke tailors, there is no need for them to offer their services anymore. They were also convinced that the rest of the world wouldn't notice if such fringe and nonessential services went missing. And so overnight all tailors, those running small family shops on busy streets in low-income countries to haute couture custom tailors from the richest of cities, were moved to work in factories. The occupation was banned completely and no new practitioners were allowed to enter it. No one to take your measurements anymore, no more tailor-made suits, no more occasions for gossip, for nurturing of social ties. At first it didn't seem like much, but slowly signs of discomfort started to appear. Those that formerly relied on tailors slowly became aware of a mood change, a feeling that the totality of life is lacking something: for those that attended glamorous social events, the experience wasn't the same without the perfect attire, it just couldn't offer the same meaning, and for the other group, the impersonal functional piece of clothing supplied by the Titans just wouldn't cut it compared to the simple dress from the tailor next-door. At the same time they felt that a connection was missing, a meaningful strand in the fabric of community. Besides that, some of the businesses downstream, those that were previously selling material to tailors, were hit hard from the fallout of revenue.

The next to go were pizza deliveries (yep, autonomous driving still didn't make it to par…). Again, a logical explanation was easily conjured for as to why they are not needed. Of course, the world didn't stop because they disappeared to go work someplace else, but it changed in ways that were hard to point out and to put in words. Many similar prohibitions to practice certain professions followed.

The changes enforced by the Titans were not organic, such as was the gradual dwindling of the profession of lamplighter and then finally its disappearance. Nowadays there is no use in having persons crawl city pavements at dusk to light gas-powered street lamps when cities around the world could easily serve as runway lights for spacecrafts descending from orbit. Let's consider some more examples of changes in prevalence of occupations. Everybody probably knows a person with the surname Miller (think Arthur, Henry or Bode), or a Mueller or a Müller (think German soccer players) and yet perhaps you do not know any miller, person with the occupation the Millers, Muellers and Müllers (and Meuniers, Molinaris, Mlinars...) owe their surname to. The Smiths of the world are as ubiquitous as can be (Ferreira, Kovalenko, Kovacs, Kovačević...) and yet nowadays the village blacksmiths tending to horse shoes, fabricating nails and mending axes and cask hoops are relegated to tourist attractions. If we assume that the frequency of an occupational surname in a population is somewhat telling of the recurrence of persons practicing the profession at the origin of such surname some centuries ago (like Bakers were bakers, Potters were potters, Skinners worked leather), then it follows that millers and blacksmiths must have been much more common in the past than today. But the relative decline of such professions with time was never forceful in any way, it happened naturally, in step with the development of the socio-economic environment and the needs stemming therefrom. Well, Titans' changes wouldn't allow for gradual adaptation, they were shocks that rocked the system.

The Titans, in their quest to orchestrate life on the planet to suit their needs, got bolder and bolder eradicating profession after profession and reskilling their practitioners. The unforeseen and unintended consequences started to tear into the social fabric, but the Titans wouldn't mind.

One day, Titan A went for a jog. It was a funny sight to behold - such a powerful body of more than 15 meters in height moving along so purposefully. The ground didn't really shake, when his feet touched down, but you could feel a muffled thud, as if the terrain cringed lightly at each impact. Then from the side, B joined him, jogging as well.

"You seem to be doing well today, A!"

"Not looking too bad yourself, B."

"Thanks. Lately I have started to take this staying in shape thing a bit more seriously. I've gotten lazy since we steadied on Earth."

"Yeah, so far our work here has turned out to be smooth sailing," replied A.

"Yup," agreed B. "Hey, listen, I got this idea... you know, about occupations and the wellbeing of human population."

"Hmh," murmured A, all the time intently gazing straight ahead, concentrated on the run.

"Dentists. I've heard people have to visit them occasionally and it takes them a lot of time and money. You know, time wasted."

"Hmmh." A was very serious about his jogging.

"And a lot of people seem to be terrified of them, a fear of the pain they might experience during their visit at the dentist's."

"They sound like a nasty bunch, these dentists," commented A.

"Maybe, but I heard they are very skilled, could come handy in factories."

"Currently we are good, no need for additional hands."

"Hmm …" B dove into his thoughts. They jogged in silence for a while.

"They eat into resources and are a scare for the rest of the population. Doesn't sound like too useful to me," finally uttered B.

A looked at him "What do you intend to say?" and then turned to face the course again.

"Well," started B, "we have never resorted to elem…"

"Are you serious?" A interrupted B and turned to him with a questioning gaze, all the while pressing on with the run. "You know the approval of the Council is needed for this."

"Of course I remember. I was just considering the facts and our options."

Later that day the Titan Council convened and the decision was adopted to go on with the procedure.

And so the next day, upon a mere utterance of a command - or was it perhaps that the trigger was the thought passing the synapses of the Titan a moment before elocution - all the dentists of the world were irreversibly fated to be gone. With a whoosh, bodies lifted for the sky, dashing through windows or just taking to the air from the spot they found themselves in at the moment. Be it they were mothers, fathers, sons, sisters or friends, doesn't matter, none were spared, the caring and competent ones and those that their patients regarded as ill-disposed brutes, all went up. Like fireflies all around the world they rose to the sky, leaving trails of blue and white smoke behind that rose persistently like pillars towards the heavens. And then suddenly all of them, with a puff, no more, elementized (elementize, in Titanspeak, to instantaneously disassociate the entire mass of a physical object into particles of matter in their elemental form).

The Titans got their decrease in need for resources and some humans got a short feeling of relief for the thought of having to experience pain at the dentist's had no substance anymore. But soon severe issues started to break out - many people were in terrible pain due to bad oral health, factories started to experience outings due to workers not being able to get to work from acute toothache and rampaging oral infections. The human populace started to feel itchy about the Titan overlords and the first cases of mutiny in Titan factories happened. Not to mention that all dentist nurses and all services formerly supporting dentists were suddenly put out of work permanently, which only fueled the general dissatisfaction brewing within the human population. Many factories were starting to get short on hands. This caused the Titans to start a new wave of retraining efforts and topping the list of occupations to be re-skilled were mechanics, quickly followed by…

The moral of the story? Wash your teeth and take care of your oral hygiene, if you are a human. If you are a Titan, watch out for unintended and unforeseen consequences of your interventions.

On planet Earth we, the developed consumerist societies, are the Titans - causing extinction of species, driving species out of their ecosystem, introducing others into non-native ecosystems, terraforming whole landscapes, destroying ecosystems, all performed lightly to egoistically serve our needs. Sure, dry out that marsh, develop the wetland, go on with that open-pit mine, cut down all the forests on that continent, but you never know what effect one single organism or physical factor in one of those places has on any other and how this effect propagates … and eventually gets back to you and whacks you on the head. Even if we limit our reasoning only to living organisms within one single ecosystem (and disregard its physical environment component and all other ecosystems on the planet and the gazillion of ways the parts of the lot influence each other), there is no scientific way with which to single out one lynchpin species, a such one that by taking care to preserve its presence in the ecosystem intact - despite otherwise an abusive encroachment into its living environment - you would succeed in avoiding a major deterioration or collapse of the ecosystem itself. No use - in an ecosystem of 500 species there are 500 lynchpins. That is what ecosystems are - intricate webs of relationships and for all practical purposes the number of causal connections between single species is infinite, and so is the potential for consequences in cases of disruptions. Now zoom out to consider the whole Earth, which is a system of systems, in the same way and it becomes obvious that the potential for the whole to get out of whack - due to our interventions - in unforeseen ways is considerable.

Life on Earth is practically infinitely resilient and won't care to bitch and complain while busy adapting to the harshest of punishments we Titans decide to impose on it. But when an insolubly complex closed system replete with feedback loops (which is the totality of the Earth system with its components of bio-, hydro-, geo- and atmosphere) needs to adapt to disrupting changes, the process takes the form of a search for a new equilibrium point and such a dynamic is frantic, unpredictable and can be violent. And so the Titans, since they are not separate from the totality of the system, will be on the receiving end in this turbulent, chaotic process that is the search. Maybe it is just the news, but it feels to me that Earth is already going through a fever caused by the Titans, ehm, humans.

But in the end, it is not the consequences of our (knowingly) deleterious actions that we should be considering, watching out for and be fearful of (although at this stage it is best not to hide and pretend not to see). It's the simple fact that we are living on a planet that is our home, and a lush and beautiful one to that. Who doesn't love their home, who doesn't want to look after their own home? It's high time to see our mother planet for what it is - our home! - and start acting lovingly towards it in accordance. Not from fear, but for real.

Ivo Makuc, 2023
byguesswork@gmail.com