Apes, Astronauts, Apocalypse

Human history is so short and the temporal significance of the Planet so great that we often forget just how incredibly volatile and dangerous it is to dwell on this Planet. A Planet that throughout its four or so billion years of existence has experienced innumerable catastrophes and apocalyptic events. Is there a chance that Nature herself has grown tired of this inevitable cycle and sought to play a death-defying game with her own existence? Has she allowed a conscious entity to escape the limits of biology and run riot on the Planet’s verdant surface in the small chance that these beings will evolve to a point of enlightened consciousness capable of transcending the laws of Nature?

In this piece I am proposing a dynamic but contrasting relationship between our Planet and Nature as a way to differentiate habitat from life. For this article I see the Planet as a neutral host, alive but unbiased, neither for nor against the life that dwells upon its surface. Here, the Planet, like an ambivalent father figure, is male. Nature, however, exists as a loving mother figure; she is the empathy to the Planet’s apathy and the one that nourishes life. They are both conscious entities. The Planet is elemental and distant; he is the land, the weather, the turning unstoppable inertia and the raging storms. Nature is all the beings that exist in the environment, from the hardy wildflower to the soaring eagle; she is life in all its astonishing diversity. The Planet is unconcerned with humanity’s survival, but for Nature we are her ultimate expression; we encompass both her creative and destructive force combined. We are her last-ditch attempt to save herself. Our path is far more erratic and unpredictable than anything that has gone before. Previously Nature played within the rules. We, however, transcend them and for the first time have the ability to change everything.

If the Planet is an unbiased observer, then meteors and asteroids are the literal wrecking balls of the cosmos. They are as inevitable as the rising sun but infinitely less predictable. The Nature-destroying boulder gods take such a devastating toll on their quarry that life is pushed to its very limits.

Meteors destroy complexity and so Nature is their antithesis. Life is anti-entropic, constantly seeking diversity, becoming more and more advanced; it creates impossibly diverse gossamer threads of complexity, linking such numerous connections that they mystify the mind. The meteor, in astonishing instants, shatters complexity and can reduce life to its constituent parts. Life disassembles and retreats, descending into labyrinthine matrices of existence, seeking shelter in the more resolute, stable strongholds of simple life and unicellular organisms. Here Nature can persist through extreme conditions, endure the fires of destruction, the darkness and seemingly infinite cold. She bides her time, waiting for the sun and some measure of homeostasis so that she can begin again the ascension to complexity.

Nature has succeeded in creating harmonious interspecies systems; relationships that beggar belief and leave one in pure astonishment at the staggering beauty and intelligence she possesses. In fact Nature is the master of this, everything created from her - save humans - seeks this equilibrium. We are an incredibly complex and paradoxical organism yet we remain Nature’s greatest achievement. The number of synapses in the human brain is larger than the number of galaxies in the observable universe. Also, there are more synapses in an average human brain than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy. We have ten trillion cells, self-organising in a symphony of perfection. This being, Homo sapiens sapiens, now holds all of Nature in its palm.

The tragedies and triumphs of our history, the terrible inequities of our modern world and the astonishing grace, genius and consciousness we can show are all necessary if we are to wake up, break from the constraints imposed on us by our biology and move into a state of technological altruism that complements and honours our Nature mother and our Planet father. We are the dark, the light and all the colours in between. Is it our destiny to become the strong adept children who augment our parents’ position, offering protection and building artifices never before conceived?

Our consciousness, innovation and our insatiable thirst for progression has allowed us to develop technology and to transcend the world created by the Planet and Nature combined. Transcendence is a solely human trait and something we should be grateful for. It may be what enables us to avoid destruction from space, where there are moon-sized asteroids in their millions that very regularly collide with celestial bodies with devastating consequences. To save Nature from this inevitability seems a valiant purpose for humanity.

Our ancestors developed technologies too. Their internal technologies make us as children to them in terms of perception, intuition and earthly synergy, but they were found wanting from a technological point of view and could not stop the great meteors of the past that obliterated cultures and almost finished humanity. The most recent catastrophic strike was around eleven thousand years ago and scientists now believe that impacts occur between three and ten times more frequently than previously thought.

Beauty is easy for Nature to create and horror easy for the great meteors to create. Nature needed to create horror; almost total all-consuming horror in humanity so that it would shake us in to a self-actualising state where we could harvest from not only the Planet and all it offers but also from the depths of the internal where mathematics, science, art and the full range of human experience exist. To harvest these things in conjunction with the faculties of Nature is humanity’s challenge; to tap the collective unconscious and apply critical thinking and the scientific method of decision making, integrating the world of Nature with enlightened technological know-how is what can bring us to a glorious present.

The troubles of the world, the cultural differences, the petty and unnecessary squabbles, religious conflicts and ideological battles would vanish if an external threat to our human existence actually manifested. Rather than make enemies from opposing cultures or religions, it would serve us far better to view the meteors of space as our nemeses, for they truly are. Worse than all the stories of demons, devils and evil spirits that has so infiltrated the human narrative. If we find the place in each of us that is the same, that resonates with true human spirit maybe we can turn our will and energy to the idea of collaboration and the effort to save ourselves from what is the inevitability of an “Invasion from Space.”

Until again... Gary Kealy