When Moggies Ruled The Earth

Chatting to Wifie today about the age of the Universe, she made the comment that, since multi-cellular life (no, not people with more than one mobile phone) has only been around for about 500 million years, the remaining 10 billion year lifetime of our Sun gives us plenty of time for all manner of life-forms to evolve and go extinct.

It got me thinking about a world, far, far in the future, when we are long gone and there has been enough time for even cats to evolve intelligence. Imagine the world dominated by intelligent cats. There'd be 3D TVs showing 24-hour tropical fish shows and cat families would gather round to stare into the set as the little fishes swam around and around. The cat supermarkets would have shelves filled with caged rodents and birds. Processed foods would be called things like 'Uncle Tiddles' Lizard Tails' and 'MouseyMunch - So Fresh You Can Hear It Squeak'. There would be aisles labelled 'Fur Care Products' and 'Sleep Accessories'. The better-off felines would go for makeovers in the department stores, where trained personnel would lick them down from head to tail, then sell them $50 bottles of 'stink restorer'.

Out on the streets, kitty biker gangs, high on catnip, would howl raucously at passing females while their rottweiller pets sat and sulked at their feet, muttering and grumbling to one another in their 'When's it gonna be our turn?' T-shirts. Groups of young toms would be playing pawball - trying to get a ball of yarn between the scratching posts before it completely unravelled. In the evening they'd all head for the discos where the females would mostly sleep in quiet corners while the toms shout and moan at one another with their fur all spiked up with trendy, flourescent mousses.

It's a shame we won't be around to see it but we would all have gone extinct five billion years earlier when the birds became sentient and realised that they didn't have to wait around for us to generate road-kill...