iStockphoto / evenfh
Remember the scene at the end of the first Men in Black movie where the camera keeps zooming out and the earth is just a tiny blip inside a marble in a vast galaxy being played with by enormous aliens? Just as how the ‘galaxy is on Orion’s belt’ our world too was revealed to be this tiny thing inside of the something incomprehensibly large…. Well, that’s what Carlsbad Caverns National Park wants us all to think about a single bag of Cheetos.
They’re not talking about ‘world changing’ in the same way we all joke that single Flamin’ Hot Cheeto would kill a 14th century peasant from the overload of flavor. The Carlsbad Caverns National Park lays out just how a single bag of Cheetos, potentially dropped by accident, can irreparably harm and alter the entire world of cave dwellers.
They posted about this on Facebook a few days ago in a post that has since gone viral:
Carlsbad Caverns National Park / NPS / Facebook
Powerful stuff. They write “At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing. Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it.” As a dude who grew up in the Boy Scouts, this speaks to me. But somehow, the effect of it all feels diminished when they show the picture of the Cheetos:
Carlsbad Caverns National Park / NPS / Facebook
Point taken, sure.
Cave dwelling creatures in Carlsbad, New Mexico can have their lives upended by the tiniest of changes. And whoever wrote this has the purest of intentions with their message. That said, someone needs to tell them they just wrote a 314 word message that could’ve simply read ‘leave no traces behind.’ The aforementioned message has since been picked up by yours truly and other outlets like the NYPost.
The artificial flavors, preservatives, high fat/salt content, that could all destroy the world of cave dwellers but, and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here for a moment, maybe it could also result in a new super species of cave dwellers and the United States would have the most alpha cave dwelling insects on earth? We really don’t know what would happen, do we?
Could this be like when Master Splinter and the turtles were first introduced to the ooze??? Most likely not but again, we don’t know for certain. Good science requires extensive testing…