Ever heard of The Infinite Monkey Theorem? It goes something like this: Given infinite time, a monkey banging randomly on typewriter keys would reproduce a given work, such as Hamlet. Variations of the theorem add more monkeys to reproduce more works, such as the complete plays of Shakespeare, or all the books in the British Museum. Mathematicians have even offered proofs of the theorem, in one case showing that if you add enough monkeys, say an infinite number, they will almost surely reproduce a given work as quickly and accurately as a human typist copying the original document.

Why stop there? We’re talking about an infinite number of monkeys with infinite time, so they should also be able to bang out the assembly instructions for every piece of Ikea furniture, and the Hubble telescope, and even the Large Hadron Collider. For pure entertainment, they could throw in the contents of every text message ever sent by teenage Earth girls. Enough. I’m practical by nature, so when a proposition such as The Infinite Monkey Theorem cannot be proven by observation and hands-on experimentation in the real world, I quickly lose interest. Which brings me to a little experiment I’m currently conducting. I say “little” because in comparison to infinite monkeys and infinite time, my experiment requires a relatively small number of monkeys and a relatively brief span of time.

My proposition, which I call The Consumer Monkey Theorem, goes something like this: Given enough time, a few monkeys would reproduce until they had consumed all the finite resources necessary for life on a given Earth-like planet. My hypothesis is that a few thousand monkeys should be able to do the job in about a million years. Fortunately, I didn’t have to transport a ship-full of monkeys to an Earth-like planet far off in space to conduct my experiment. The Earth itself was available. And I found just the right species of monkeys, eager to plunder the planet of its finite life-giving resources. Humans. Now, the picayunish among you are no doubt thinking that humans are not, in fact, monkeys. They call their species Homo sapiens (which translates to “wise guy”), and they place themselves in the taxonomic family of great apes, along with gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. All right, I’ll give you that. I still think of humans as my little monkeys, but you may call them apes and refer to my proposition as The Consumer Ape Theorem if you must. Whatever you call it, it’s being proven correct not by obscure mathematical formulae, but by observation in a real world.

Fossil datings have fixed the emergence of Homo sapiens at less than 500,000 years ago, perhaps as few as 195,000 years ago for humans anatomically like those of today. Studies using mitochondrial DNA indicate that the species nearly died out about 70,000 years ago. That was the happy “accident” that made my experiment possible. Starting with a few thousand humans at that time, this plucky species has grown to nearly 7 billion today. And, oh, what monkeyshines they’ve been up to — most of it in just the last few hundred years. They’ve drilled holes and dug mines miles deep, scooped out pits and stripped away surfaces miles wide, even flattened entire mountains, all to extract metals and minerals, solids, liquids, and gasses, all of it millions or billions of years in the making, all of it to meet their insatiable appetite for their planet’s resources. They’ve burned down and clear-cut forests, dammed rivers and streams, and paved over swamp and marshland, watershed and prairies, even fertile farmland to make room for their homes and stores and factories. They’ve hooked and netted most of the fish in the oceans and pumped and dumped waste products in their place, leaving wide expanses toxic to sealife. The collateral damage in the war on nature is immense. A worldwide mass extinction claims 30,000 plant and animal species every year. Even the two most precious resources for human life — fresh air and fresh water — are endangered. The atmosphere is befouled and warming. And many humans can no longer depend on a supply of drinkable water, as pollution and depletion affect both surface water and underground aquifers. If my calculations are correct, the monkey civilization has already grown past the point its planetary resources can sustain. Drought, famine, pollution, and pestilence already take many monkey lives in locales around the planet, setting the stage for a widespread die-off of the species as resources become ever more scarce. It’s like one of their disaster movies come to life.

Of course, this progress report would not meet the standards of a peer-reviewed exobiology journal anywhere in the known universe, but you have to admit that the results so far are encouraging. I do concede that my hypothesis was considerably off the mark. It appears that a few thousand monkeys will have reproduced and consumed their way through their planet’s life-giving resources in just over 70,000 Earth years, a fraction of the million I had predicted. Well, that’s why we scientists subject our theories to experimentation. In this way science marches on. Meanwhile, my monkeys march on, as well. Right off a cliff, most of them blissfully unaware of the fate that awaits them. My only concern at this stage of the experiment is that I am able to wrap up the project and publish my final report before a wayward comet or gamma ray burst spoils everything. Wish me luck.

(Click evidence for more about the multiple crises humanity is facing and scenarios for other possible endings to the great human experiment on planet Earth.)