On The Necessity of Establishing a ‘Plan B’ for our species…

We live on the cusp of a situation where, previously, it was impossible for a single human being or a relatively tiny group… to introduce a technology or behavior that radically alters the entire meaning of the history of life on Earth… by radically altering the current and future paths of both the biosphere and human beings. Of course, one might argue, there was never not such a time… at least not after the industrial revolution… it was a matter of scope and rate… to which I will both agree, and assert that the modern degree of »compression of scope and rate has gone functionally exponential…

The dark side of this, is that it is presently possible (by which I mean achievable) for a highly motivated individual to collapse the biosphere. To produce an endgame scenario for life on Earth, or, at the very least, to reduce the remaining pool of organisms to the phase where there are no complex organisms anymore.

And some will argue ‘Well the Earth has been through that before,’ and I find this objection puerile, because, while not merely trivial, it rejects active responsibility while at the same time failing to properly address a variety of outcome scenarios by simply presuming that the complex organisms and ecologies will (eventually) recover. There are many situations where this will not occur, and the relationship between the Earth and the Sun (and interstellar space) has changed since the previous extinction events… there is no reason to believe that ‘the Earth will recover’ or that the currently extant ecologies are rendered provisionally expendable by such a disembodied and abstract assertion.

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Another side of this situation, however, is that it is now possible for single individuals (and small groups) to introduce both behavioral and technological innovations… including »purposes… that are so beyond anything humans have ever seen or even been aware of… that they could »outcompete all other options and establish entirely new ways of »being human (and belonging in and with nature). Ways so compelling and demonstrably intelligent that no one (or nearly no one) would be interested in doing the old things.

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If you imagine the first primate that didn’t merely get a hold of a sharp rock, or realize that rock (a) was sharper than rock (b), but began… to be able to understand the »concept of sharpness… and then to be able to communicate that, to transfer it, to other primates… you will understand that human »purposive development, call it evolution if you wish, has been languishing for the past many centuries. We allowed tool development to overcome every other aspect of development, because it was both convenient and productive in the sense of reducing the efforts required to survive or «prosper (if we take a narrow enough, or ever-narrowing view of what prosperity actually means, so as to exclude a number of virtues outside the scope of commodity-gathering or power consolidation).

What I am suggesting is the purposive and behavioral analog of the scenario exemplified by the first primate to »leap an order of awareness of in terms of utility… from instance to »class. This kind of leap is not merely possible for our species… the entire history and future of life on Earth can be understood to be »exerting profound pressure on us… to either advance in this way… or … to be »shocked by a cascade of devastating cataclysms that will induce us to change course or perish.

Yet, the »opposite of shock exists, and it is the ecstatic recovery of aspects of our organismal and human natures that have long been co-opted by our familiar circumstances, cultures and contexts.

I have seen what appears to me as evidence that Earth is something resembling a superorganism. That the ecologies and species are not merely organs, but organs of sensing and relation for the Earth, that their disappearance, however gradual or sudden, comprises a crises analogous to a stroke, and that the Earth experiences a significant metalogue of ‘concern’ about these matters. Our species is not only ‘not separate’ from these matters, our minds and health… our awareness and metabolism arise directly from them.

We are extensions of the body of living beings on the Earth. And the Earth’s ‘organs and senses’ are extensions of our own. But our species, in thought and action, has, for far too long, presumed otherwise. We have presumed we are ‘above’ nature and biology. That we can ‘master’ or ‘direct’ it as if there were some second world here that will sustain us if, in our hubris, we burn down the relationships… we are made of.

I say this for a simple reason: those capable of introducing and proceeding on a path that preserves both the ecologies and our species… by transforming what we are and do and the purposes for which we act… might ‘make friends’ of a sort that we, at present, have neither ideas nor imaginings of. For if the Earth is a superorganism, I suggest that she has friends. And those friends… will assist her in crisis. We do not want to become that crisis, and we have. But if we shall become the solutions, we will gain more than mere survival. We will be introduced to orders of intelligence and relation … that are the origins of our minds. Intelligences our ideas and behaviors have long ignored, attacked, avoided, counterfeited…. and denied.

In our time, a single human being, properly equipped and supported… has the power to redirect and redefine the history, future… and nature… of our species and our relationships to the contexts natural to our kind of animal. Or destroy them. We must consider this carefully. And ensure that something resembling the former option … presents us with a path worth traveling together. With and for the history and future not merely of life on Earth. But Life itself.

— inspired by listening to Daniel Schmactenberger (w/Eric Weinstein on The Portal)