Humans are the only species in the animal kingdom capable of massacre and incredible destruction. We chop rainforests down, we take ocean predators and stick them in cages, we shoot down our own neighbours.
And yet, we're so defenseless. We're like the bullies of the world making ourselves big and mighty and powerful because, actually, we're so fragile and scared.
I remember my English teacher at college telling me once that she'd read that society only worked because everyone was afraid of death.
Ebola could wipe us out. All it would take would be a handful of infected people to travel round the world and spread the contamination.
It's scary because mortality from Ebola is 90%, our medical knowledge doesn't span the length of finding us a cure and, in the end, we're just these tiny little people on a place called Earth. We're just a species. A species like the Dodo, that have no back up for extinction.
Resourcefulness doesn't make us immortal. It's those moments when you watch the news or read the paper that make you think: there's nothing to stop this all caving in.
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