“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” – Stephen Hawking

In The Beginning

In the beginning, Earth was a violent, desolate planet. Oceans were split by empty rock landmasses. No life existed on the planet, no aquatic life, no land life. No trees or plants or animals. Violent earthquakes, volcanoes, and oceans shaped the surface of the planet.

Earth was nothing more than an infant planet in an infant solar system.

Time passed, think billions of years. The planet developed, constantly shifting.

And then there was life. I can't comment on the origin of life, but Richard Dawkins wrote on this topic in The Ancestor's Tale, and I find his words meaningful and fulfilling. You can find this section in Appendix I.

We can be certain that the Earth was prepared to support life, offering resources necessary to support life. Otherwise, none of this, the living world around us, would have happened; life wouldn't exist.

Here was a planet ready to promote life for billions of years into the future. All it needed was a seed to start the adventure of life.

And so it was, early life developed, constantly shifting. The planet’s upheavals and the constantly evolving life worked together to reshape the Earth. Eventually, green entered the landscape above the oceans.

Time passed, think billions of years.

About 250,000 years ago, modern humans evolved. Ours is the first species capable of understanding the development of Earth and the life it cradles. We alone are capable of stepping back to take in the spectacle that evolution and ecology developed.

Super-Macro Evolution

What did Earth look like at the dawn of life? Dead. Completely dead. Imagine the Earth without a single green plant. Dead. A sterile planet without even bacteria running about.

Oceans, volcanoes, mountains, weather, and storms were the primary features of Earth when life was born.

All was rock, sand, or water. Lightning was a feature of the weather, but fire was not possible since no flammable fuel existed on Earth.

Things are a bit different now. Life permeates the Earth. There are very few places on Earth that are absent of life. Even the top of the highest mountain, Everest, a truly desolate place, is visited frequently by humans.

Super-Macro Evolution is the process of life as it transforms a dead planet with basic resources capable of supporting life to a planet blanketed with a variety of life and complex resources.

It’s a process that starts with a planet at the birth of life. The planet is basically dead, just oceans with beaches that meet desolate lands transformed by geology and time.

Super-macro evolution can transform a dead wet rock into a green paradise flowing with life. This is the process that created the Earth as we now know it.

At one point, the diversity of life on Earth was zero. Earth was a dead wet rock. But now, with millions of species, there is an amazing diversity of life on Earth. At some point, life formed, and diversity started. Evolution and time took over, and the results are the Earth we live on today.

Super macro evolution is the realization of the science fiction concept of terraforming, a process that converts a dead planet into a live one through technology. The difference being that the evolution of life is the cause of this process, which took billions of years.

I can't think of a more amazing process.

Where Are We Now?

Many biologists feel that we are currently experiencing a major extinction event known as the Holocene Extinction. E.O. Wilson of Harvard University predicts that humanity’s destruction of the biosphere could cause the extinction of one-half of all species in the next 100 years. That’s pretty effective environmental destruction.

This would imply that the greatest variety of life an individual could experience was at the time of his or her birth. Every second thereafter is farther down an extinction event.

Make sure to enjoy all of the diversity of life you are able to, for tomorrow offers less than today.

This is a defeatist approach to life, but life itself is being defeated by the actions of one species, us. Our concept of caring only applies to ourselves. This is natural; almost all species are selfish and need to be in order to survive. A few participate in reciprocal relationships with others, such as the cleaner fish that feed off the dead skin and parasites carried by other fish species. Sometimes we attempt reciprocal relationships with species once we push them to the edge of extinction.

Such is life. Such is human nature.

Welcome to the real world.

References

• EO Wilson (start here: Wikipedia)

In The End

In the end, the sun will burn off the oceans and life on this planet will die. Estimates of when this will happen vary from one billion years to five billion years.

In the very long run, things you do today are irrelevant because eventually life will cease to exist.

We won’t become interstellar travelers. It makes for good science fiction, but we just don’t understand the ecosystem and evolutionary interactions that are necessary to sustain long-term off-planet life.

A simple requirement of interstellar travel would be the ability to create and maintain a functioning artificial ecosystem. If the state of Earth with its degraded ecosystems is any indication, humanity’s attempts at artificial ecosystems are destined to fail.

Frankly, we don’t deserve a future in space, leaving the vast majority of species to wither on the shell of the depleted planet we leave behind. Justice mandates that we stay and take our due, just as the captain of a sinking ship accepts his fate and goes down with the boat.

Human nature is against us, as it was developed by evolution, and it isn’t something we as a species can defeat.

I don't mean to sound defeatist; it's not the point at all. Everything is perspective, and humanity lives in the now. There is little regard for the future, which we leave to our children. As a species, on a local level, we need to consider the world we leave to future generations. In the end, it's all for naught; the fate of the sun is the fate of the Earth. We have the opportunity to exist for millions and millions of years, but only if we consider the future and plan accordingly.

We don't need to plan for a million years into the future. We don't need to plan for even a thousand years into the future. We need to plan for about 100 years into the future, if even that far.

Rampant consumption is not sustainable and will destroy the Earth. If we let it.

Happiness is the meaning of life. Try and find it.

Citations

• One billion years (find a better reference): BBC News