I love this planet in every way that love is possible. Everything that I know and all that matters is here. I love the Earth precisely in the manner that an infant mammal loves its mother, from which it has received life and nourishment. I love it in the way that a father loves his family, as he works to assure their well-being.
I love the array of life which this wildly inventive planet has developed. Earth is the only planet we know of with speciation, with genera and orders and phyla. Terrestrial evolution has created a million species of beetles, and is making more species still, right under our noses. Every one of these species has a job, and is good at it.
I love its climates. Room temperature is vanishingly rare in this universe. Earth is the only planet in the universe which we know has nude beaches. Should we leave, we are going to have to get very accustomed to space suits.
I value Earth absolutely. It is my home. I could have developed on and survived on no other planet. The protection provided by the magnetosphere from the sun’s high energy radiation, without which life could not have been possible, earns the planet a very rare place in the pantheon of worlds, and makes it uniquely my home.
I appreciate that Terra has a molten core. A lot of planets do. But I am very impressed with what has been done with it here. Plate tectonics have taken what would otherwise be a featureless sphere and given it, at least on the human scale, variation and visual interest. In so doing, tectonics have created a wide variety of habitats; these have served as nurseries for the birth of new species–a complex planet creating complex life.
The life of my planet is held together by food webs. I, your humble author, am myself a participant in, and a component of, this food web. I am both edible and readily biodegradable. I conceivably could be eaten or decomposed before I even reach the end of this writing, so please keep your fingers crossed.
My planet runs on nuclear radiation, its life energized by sunlight. Another planet might have found a simpler way to have energy flow through its life forms, or may have settled for a less interesting system of nourishment, but my lovely planet invented grapes and apricots and carrots and apples and figs; sweet seductions that induce me to intake energy (and distribute seeds), for which I am profoundly grateful.
My planet has predators. These are animals which cannot convert sunlight to energy nor can they profitably consume the primary producers — plants — that do accomplish this conversion. Every eagle that soars, every tiger that stalks, every wolf that howls, thrilling me with their wild graceful savagery, exists only because of the bloody trail they have left behind, a series of killings, ambushes, infanticides and disembowelings without which they cannot survive and for which we must hold them blameless.
Monsters haunted my children’s nightmares. I would not tell my children the lie that there are no monsters; I could only tell them that I would protect them from the monsters. My planet has created crocodiles and evolved great white sharks. It has invented Ursus horribilis and Crotalus horridus. To these very real monsters, my precious child is nothing but meat. I look at salmon in much the same monstrous way; that’s how things are done on this planet.
This planet I love harbors weird things that drill and pierce and bite and poison; things that I have a hard time intellectually appreciating, let alone loving. Earth has invented bloodsuckers in thousands of nasty types; mosquitos, ticks, guinea worms, televangelists and leeches. It is really good at parasites, having malaria, bilharzia, tsetse flies and tapeworms out the yin-yang. Along with the beauty it has created, it has also come up with very dangerous critters; stinging jellyfish, black mambas, violent ideologues with AK47’s, bull sharks, boomslangs, gaboon vipers, lion fish, suicide bombers and Brazilian Wandering Spiders.
The pressures of survival on this planet have formed my own species in some weird ways. To survive as a member of a primitive tribe we had to conform to cultural and religious norms, and those pressures still bind us today. Hardwired religiosity can be so strong as to override common sense (see: “televangelists” and “zealots” above) and even the mother/child bond (see: Game Of Thrones). We fear strangers. We judge others in a split second by the color of their skin. We act illogically.
But Earth’s evolutionary pressures also rewarded intelligence. At least once, that is. A rare fluke? Perhaps. Though eyes have evolved along a number of different pathways and could very possibly arise again, there has been only one instance of development of that level of intelligence which humans demonstrate. Only one creature has appeared that can both intellectually comprehend its place on the planet and, at the same time, demonstrate the technological and psychological capacity for bombing its own species into oblivion.
This planet invented sex. Sex is life’s way of turbocharging adaptability and maximizing its chances of survival. It shuffles the deck of diversity, which is where natural selection gains traction.
This planet has the hottest women in the universe–another sweet inducement. The way I am built, look and function, as with so many of my fellow animals, is the result of a quirk of terrestrial evolution; sexual selection. Natural selection chooses to keep those who are quick, alert and strong. Sexual selection chooses and furthers the reproductive success of those who possess extravagant tail feathers, a complex and energetic song, ample yet perky breasts, expensive impractical cars and outlandishly large antlers.
Species diverge when they are removed by this planet’s geography from their former companions and when conditions exert differing selective pressures on the now distinct populations. They sometimes diverge only slightly (becoming varieties or races), but on occasion they become so isolated that they drift far away from earlier norms. When this happens they may become so different that they cannot interbreed with the original stock, at which point speciation becomes complete.
The Earth’s geography has caused humans to differentiate noticeably as we walked about on our long journeys, but we are still very much a single species. With geographic distances now diminishing in the wakes of our ships and airplanes, we are presently in a phase in which we are interbreeding like crazy and stirring the genetic stew. Opportunities to ‘interbreed like crazy’; I really like that in a planet.
Unfortunately for those of us aware of our own mortality, sex also brings obsolescence and death. Our children are our replacements. Evolution only needs us until our children are fully on their own. Evolution never saw reason to build us so that we would survive beyond the dubiously-useful years of grandparenthood. Do I hate my planet for this cruelty? Can’t say that I do.
Earth is nearly invisible in the universe. If some of us leave this planet, and head for the next, we will loose this precious globe in our rear viewscreens before we are even one percent of the way to the next star system. It would take immense computational power to capture and store and analyze enough data for the descendants of these pioneers to ever find their way back.
Most of us won’t have to worry about that possibility. I will never leave this planet, nor will you. Breaking up with this planet would be very hard to do. We would incinerate the atmosphere if we tried to lift into orbit with chemical rockets even one out of every thousand of Earth’s human inhabitants. Those successfully launched toward far systems will need to find a way to live in harmony inside their tiny metal rooms (with or without cryogenic sleep) for hundreds of years and many generations. Unfortunately, we haven’t established a great record at this getting-along-together thing, even when we have had lots of elbow room.
Will the advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial super intelligence) change this projection? It seems impossible to say with even a tiny bit of certainty; there are too many unknowns beyond that threshold.
Right now, Earth is all we have. It hangs alone in the star-spangled immensity of space. It has given us life, formed us, strengthened us and sheltered us.
Any alien we might bump into could discern by our form and biological accent that Earth is our home, and that we are earthlings. Should we encounter any alien intelligence, they can safely assume that any and every one of us would give our lives to protect this living planet; we are predictable in that way, and we won’t be able to entrap them by pretending to approve their domination and exploitation.
We may not need to accommodate aliens; they might find this planet abhorrent. Just as they are, I, too, am molecules and atoms and quarks and muons; I am made up of this universe’s stardust. Unlike the alien, I am equally flesh and blood and bone; an animal of Earth.
This planet has sheltered you and I and the human species, but the Earth cannot protect us from everything. The living planet itself is vulnerable. An asteroid the size of a medium-sized hill entering the atmosphere at 100,000 miles per hour could wipe out my species. A mountain-sized asteroid could wipe out every living thing except the most resistant microorganisms. A gamma ray burst could scorch away every spark of life on my beloved world.
Can we, should we, change this planet, as we develop toward an technological capacity that can help protect it? Should we worry less about global climate change and more about underdevelopment and a consequent technological inability to protect our living world? I leave you with this question, and I hope you will consider it.
My generation soon will turn the care of this lovely planet over to you–our children, nieces and nephews and descendants. We wish you every success.
Joy, shipmates, joy.