“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

Nowhere else in animated television has an artistic vision of God spoken as poignantly as the one from “Futurama”.

For me, though, I’d only change a couple words to capture what I’m realizing is the endless challenge of communication: When you say things right, people won’t be sure you’ve said anything at all — and that includes you.

Philosophers muse that everything is communication, from a whispered voice in a crowded amphitheater to silent beams of light engulfing the bark of trees in an empty wood. Communication, in this sense, is less about the direct movement of intelligible information and more like that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you get to the top of a rollercoaster — there’s no doubting you experience it, but there need be no answer as to truly why it happens.

Perhaps the rollercoaster is a bad analogy. An anatomist could certainly tell you how our organs are almost weightless in free fall and so move at different speeds inside our bodies. A neuroscientist could know exactly which tissue connects with which pathway in the brain that gives us that sinking feeling. A physicist could even explain the subatomic makeup of all these structures.

But you can feel it as well as any of them. I’ll only assume a chimp,  deer or praying mantis might feel it just the same. The thing is, they’ll never say a word about it to us, each other or the feeling itself.

I’ve always been fascinated how animals communicate with each other. Polar bear cubs know when it’s time to leave their mother and siblings behind. Peregrine falcons (like the two that nest on the UND water tower next to Starcher Hall) migrate in the winter and often return to the same spots each year with their mates. Microscopic nematode worms find each other in the soil without eyes, ears or Facebook messaging.

Apparently, none of those things are necessary and yet we’re constantly bickering to one another as if the Futurama God intended us to. Perhaps it did.

But when the meadowlark sings on a rotten fence post; when sightless roots grind through concrete sidewalk slabs; when a heart beats against the blanketed head of an infant child — the natural world might wonder if anything’s done anything at all.

Billy Beaton is the video editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]