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The Fate of Gaia
As much as I like the Gaian Hypothesis, I don't like the conclusions many have drawn from it. I like to take a different view of the matter, one that was hinted at by the author of The Millennial Project, and one expressed by many other space enthusiasts and space activists. What if humans were evolved for a purpose? As much destruction as we have caused, Gaia might have evolved humanity to become agents of its creation. If Gaia is a living organism, then we should expect that it will do what all organisms do. Gaia will die whether or not humans are the cause of its demise. It may happen tomorrow, or maybe not for billions of years. The only way to "escape" it is to reproduce. That is the idea of the Pregnent Mother Earth metaphor. By evolving an intelligent and "handy" species, Gaia has evolved a reproduction system. As it stands, humanity is the only species with the ability to travel from Earth and into space, and is thus the only means for the transmission of life into space.
1 comment:
I've always thought that the Gaia Hypothesis clearly led to the idea that humans are integrally important, but not as a reproduction system. We probably aren't the only species that can travel into space -- at least in theory, lichens and microbes can as well, by being ejected from the atmosphere inside dust particles fleeing the site of explosions/impacts/eruptions/etc.
I suspect we're building the next generation of "nervous tissue" and once that's done, we'll go the way of all scaffolding species.
But I can't rule out that we're really a kind of infection, either.
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