Considering the quantity not of time but of populations
over time we can accurately speculate that a living planet
as diversely embodied as Earth became some 1,500 million years ago
has enjoyed the benefit of having entire universes of biological
time in which to experience and prepare for the consequences of
foreseeable and unforeseeable local and systemic disasters. This
essential sort of aperiodic ’clock’ of local and systemic
catastrophe has informed not only the shapes and features of terrestrial
Life, but also our own cognitive natures, sources, symbolic languages,
and organizations. It is one of the deepest ‘general signatures’
written into the living systems, cognitive systems, and even human
intellectual systems on our world.
In diversifying across scale and form-templates, and adopting the
strangely progressive adaptation of individual death, (and perhaps
by extension, the sacrifice of species under some conditions) the
essential symmetry of living matter on Earth achieved a profound
advantage over cataclysm which was selected for in the form of better
general conservation of the accruals of the entire unity
of living systems, at nearly every possible scale. And this was
a necessary advantage. Earth has suffered no less than 20 large-scale
penetrations by extraterrestrial objects. During only one of these
events, 60% of the forms of complex life were extinguished. This
was a loss that makes the burning of the library of Alexandria seem
like losing a molecule of water from the ocean. Thousands of billions
of life-years of carefully nurtured evolutionary accruals and systemic
connectivities were suddenly erased, and the living complexity sacrificed
in that event was no minor loss for a living world. An analogy would
be if you were struck in the head and awoke to discover 60% of every
system in your body had burned out. Memory, perception, senses,
intellect, identity — everything. And with such organismal
losses invariably come the most disastrous of all — losses
of essential and specific connectivity.
We are the survivors of such catastrophes, and the inheritors of
their outcomes. In our cognitive nature, languages, and societies
we represent the living history of our planet — before we
represent anything. Written into us at the very deepest level, is
a kind of shape-based memory of these events, and this
is generally conserved in our languages, folk-tales, religions and
stories. They are remembered in a general way at every scale of
Life, recorded in the structure and connectivity of our biocognitive
characters and sources. Another aspect is written into the physical
forms of cells, plants and animals. The way this is written is not
difficult to see, and if you should ever chance to notice it —
the experience will open a shocking vista of possibility in your
heart and mind. The precise stories of our world’s genesis
and history are written like a book of living letters. Each one
uniquely conserves a particle that relates to all the others. And
seen in the correct order of time and relation, they emerge very
suddenly with a singular tale. It is a story in which we are stars,
and our species has yet to rediscover it in ourselves, or our world.
I must believe that this is the actual moment when we shall overcome
this.
Recent media has made it general knowledge that a Near Earth Passing
object could wreak environmental omnicide on Earth on scales unimaginable
to we who now exist here. Our species is not so young that we have
not already weathered many such events, often of smaller magnitude,
as recorded in our written and spoken histories. We find the clearest
sort of evidence of their reality in the geologic record of Earth,
even as we still rather poorly understand it. Such events are recorded
clearly in the records of departed cultures and times as well, though
I believe we often vastly misinterpret what we inherit. We are different
minds from theirs, and truly, to know them, we must touch their
minds.
It is not surprising that topics related to the interpretation of
cataclysm would be consistently conserved by ancient and indigenous
cultures — their priorities made sense, and were pragmatic.
They wanted to preserve what was most important. First, they must
cohesively present the universal hyperphore(s) (the structure of
the universe) and our relations with it and its god(s). Beyond that,
if there was anything any ancient human civilization ever desired
to communicate to the future, it was this:
Occasionally, often without warning, a celestial visitor brings
death to nearly everything. Sometimes, it brings novelty as well,
or great change. Occasionally, the Earth itself rises up in seeming
reprisal.
Our species is the only feature of Earth which could have a shot
at deflecting a large earthbound object. We must realize that a
living planet has no obvious way to protect itself against
the cataclysmic losses of such an event. A single impact of significant
magnitude could functionally or completely exterminate the organismal
lineages of Earth, and thus, the animal of Earth. Like a human being
killed by the hydrostatic shock of being hit by a bullet in the
arm, 99.999% of the complex and animalian ecologies could be eliminated
in a single stroke with a large enough impact.
The work of a biosphere in creating integrations of evolution at
given scales is complex, and takes a lot of uninterrpted time —
environmentally speaking. It is not by chance that the basic pattern
of biology on earth creates integrations which preserve and capitalize
upon the diverse accruals of previously evolved lineages from diverse
scales of size and activity. We don’t have to be scientists
to understand that the planet is like an biocognitive ocean which
produces children who hide inside the next generation of larger,
more complex children.
The biologies of Earth function like an evolutionary linear accelerator,
and they accrue their greatest potentials by optioning the unityFeatures
of diversely conserved elements. This happens in an amazing way.
If we make a cone where time and the arisal of sizes of living organization
are synchronized, we can set scales there. At each scale, we see
an emergent integration of all the conservations below it. Nature
is literally compressing and packing her conservations into each
new generation of form, as well as each individual. So as we rise
up such a cone, toward our own species, each accrual below us is
literally pressing for the creation of ’something like what
we are’ in terms of organisms.
We can reasonably speculate then, that a living planet would struggle
to produce exactly our sort of life form — primarily
because the organizational principles we may observe will continue
to tend to lead toward this even if we were removed from the equation.
More curiously perhaps, another planet like our own might even struggle
to create a species with somewhat similar mechanical technologies:
for these would be required to inwardly understand (as an organism),
and respond to (as a biology) a threat that which can stagger or
erase a living planet. A threat to the entirety of the living history
and majesty of the blue jewel that is our mother, and the nursery
in which we very uniquely and intimately arise.
Only a creature capable of noticing, recording, metaphying and technologically
responding could be of aid in such a circumstance. And this is and
has always been the circumstance of living systems of any possible
form or scale upon our world. If Earth is like a cell, we must imagine
that her immune system evolves in concert with her biocognitive
experience and perception of threats. The activity of our own species,
seen as a single organism, recapitulates this general feature of
Life. We have the potential to exist as protectors. Yet, something
is wrong. We are playing the role of the imapact-event, instead
of the hero.
The answers to why, and how we can invert this perilous circumstance
lie in the sources of our relations with language, god(s), mind,
living symmetries, and each other.
