Spider Yeah this time I did it right
In my junior year at university I took a life-changing class called “Habitable Planets” which taught us the methodology behind finding habitable planets and potential life in space. For the final, we were given a simulated chunk of space and told to use all of what we’d learned that semester to identify and catalogue a certain number of various types of stars, a certain number of various types of planets and their probable geological makeup, and a certain number of habitable planets.
It took several hours worth of work a spreadsheet full of data points and finally I was nearing completion. As I was finishing, a tiny speck of a spider crawled onto the screen of my laptop. Unconsciously I swiped at it to brush it away but accidentally killed it and smeared it across the screen.
I stared at it for a moment, breathless.
Streaked across my project was the corpse of the very thing I had been searching for in a theoretical sense for the past several months. Life. If it had been something from another planet, that minuscule spider would have been the single most revolutionary discovery of human history. And I had crushed it without sparing even half a thought.
I haven’t killed a single spider since.