Greta wrote:Humanity also seems to be functioning as a reproductive system; if Earth's biota is to persist elsewhere in space after the Earth becomes uninhabitable, humans appear to be joining microbes as the biosphere's best chance for continued reproduction.
Lucylu wrote:You have a much more positive view of people than me. You seem to think we are symbiotic with nature whereas I feel we are in conflict with the elements. I don't really think of humans as being part of the planet. Perhaps due to our neurosis, we are more detached from nature and even our own bodies than other animals? Society certainly makes me feel that way. Its only when I am truly alone, in nature, that I feel in tune with my surroundings but in a city, I am only a human and nothing else. We are essentially users. When Earth is empty, we will move or die but I'm not sure that we will curb climate change for the sake of the planet; only ourselves. After all, the planet will go on and survive, come what may. It is humans we have to save but we seem unable to take action until we are truly in fear for our lives.
In the past I was as misanthropic as anyone I've since debated this topic with. Then I saw the illogic of it. We are nature. We are as much a part of the biosphere as any other animal and, it seems, an exceedingly important part.
The problem is that we don't like change. We are born into a particular environment and it's to that environment that we are usually best adapted and most comfortable. This, is why people become middle and old aged complainers about "new fangled" things, and especially judge younger generations, the main agents of change. So we don't like change but it's inevitable. Clearly for peace of mind we need to reconcile ourselves with change and be more mentally and emotionally adaptable. As they say, you can't fight city hall.
The elephant in the room is humanity's weirdness, our difference. Hence all speculative talk of us being aliens, despite our genetic and morphological similarities with other great apes. Also perplexing is our combination of destruction and construction. It seems to me that the Earth is becoming something it was not before, just as it did as it when it shifted from the Hadean to the Archean eons. What is a shift of eons in terms of the biosphere? Metamorphosis. How does metamorphosis work? Old structures are destroyed in a process called apoptosis, and they are supplanted by novel structures. In cancer there is cell death without a replacement organisation; the cancerous area becomes informationally very simple and chaotic. By contrast, humans deal death but fill the void with informationally rich structures, as is the case in metamorphosis.
Many workers know how it feels to be a small individual when large structures are restructured. The scale and stakes with the biosphere are very much greater, but the dynamic is equivalent. To those alive today, current events are about as welcome to them as the dinosaurs would have welcomes the asteroid that killed them off.
Just as we mourn our children getting older and losing their innocence, it seems that humanity generally is mourning the loss of nature, our evolutionary childhood. Yet, should we want to Earth to locked in a juvenile state forever? Just like us, the Earth is always growing, changing and evolving, even if those changes are awful from the perspective of current crop of conditioned inhabitants. Yes, something precious is lost but something even more precious is likely to emerge.
Whatever the changes bring, I hope it's less brutal than the wild today, with its currency of death and suffering.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated—Gandhi.
- By Fried Egg
- By Sanju Lali
- By Thrylix
- By Pattern-chaser