Reply #59: Nope, if we destroy the atmosphere (ozone holes, CO2, etc.), that's it for current life forms

[Peace Patriot]

or anything like them. Could be the sulphur based wormlike critters at the bottom of the sea or other extremophiles might continue and might even evolve sentience (ability to contemplate the Universe--my definition) over time, but the chance for any life forms will be pretty much nixed. With ripped, damaged atmosphere--that thin, fragile blue film around the planet--the sun will fry the Earth, it will get bombarded with meteors as well, and it will eventually resemble Mars.

Odd, when you think about it, that Mother Nature would evolve a species with high intelligence, touching ability to contemplate the Universe and no common sense--a species that would destroy the matrix of life from which it emerged, that would trash its own home, that can think about things, and even develop the capability to see and study things, billions of light years away, that is so intelligent that it penetrates the secrets of DNA, of evolution, of subatomic particles, and develops knowledge that could lead to directing its own evolution, to transforming one form of matter into another, to terraforming planets, to traveling to other solar systems and even galaxies, to conquering space-time itself and possibly even death itself. WHAT are the evolutionary advantages of such high intelligence without wisdom and compassion--high intelligence that is so myopic that it cannot perceive--or can't stop--self-destruction, by trashing its only home?

I sometimes think that some other process is at work that we can't see because we are in the middle of it--for instance, that Mother Nature is not just the Earth, but the Cosmos, and that a Cosmic birth process is going on, pushing toward sentience--the Cosmos contemplating itself by developing critters who can contemplate it--and pushing its sentient critters off their planets to expand to and colonize solar systems and galaxies--maybe ultimately to join up in a collective consciousness, that becomes something like what we now think of as God.*

Why ELSE would such a contradictory creature--as human beings are--be so successful, in evolution as we understand it? In short, we have overpopulated the Earth in order to push ourselves off the Earth, in an evolutionary process that we can't perceive--yet, anyway--because we are of Earth. We can only see what's happened here, biologically--that wild critters live and propagate commensurate with their food source, that wild systems tend toward balance and variety, and that we are the only unbalanced critter, propagating way beyond the ability of the Earth to sustain us, at least in the way we live--with refrigerators and computers and so on. Maybe we can't see WHY.

Haven't you ever had this thought? That is doesn't make sense? That evolution (as we understand it) has never produced another critter here on Earth--besides us--who trash the place, by overpopulation and over-consumption? WHAT is the evolutionary advantage of these characteristics? Has evolution stopped? Surely not. So, WHY have we developed these characteristics--except that there is a much bigger evolutionary process at work--call it marco-evolution--in which Mother Cosmos is favoring the spread of sentience in the material universe?

It is to our advantage, as individuals and as a species, to move on--to leave Earth, to create greenery elsewhere and create yet more sentient critters--to put eyes on all the planets with which to contemplate the Universe. And only then will we develop the wisdom and compassion to cherish lush, green Earthian places--and create them rather than trash them.

We are at a precipice. There is no going back to a "hunter-gatherer" balance with wild nature. There is no natural idyl to which we can return. We may be forced by disaster to rig up an existence that uses "hunter-gatherer" and early farming skills, and may end up as little Gaia-worshipping communes, dotted here and there, on our trashed planet, but if the World Wildlife Fund is correct, we won't be here even in that state--tiny islands of green survival in a post-industrial trash heap--or it won't last for long. Are we going to expire? Or are we going to ... move on? Is this where evolution is pushing us, on principles of adaptation, mutation and natural selection that we cannot even grasp because they are cosmic-scale principles?

We might retard the deterioration of Planet Earth if we act soon, collectively, worldwide. But our problem of overpopulation is, in truth, insoluable--or rather it will solve itself by mass die-off's of human beings, if we remain confined to Earth. Can I have hit upon the truth of things--that, to evolve, we must leave--and that, if we don't, we will simply dead-end ourselves by destroying Earth?

------

*(Arthur Clarke wrote about this concept in a wonderful novel called "Childhood's End.")