There will always be dangers facing humans in living in the natural world as embodied animals. Nature, then, comprises a domain where safety, comfort and life-support are neither guaranteed nor universal.

In this sense, our* world can be analogized as an astonishingly complex ‘live spacecraft’. This craft, and the contexts required to sustain it, are incredibly vulnerable to damage or extinction. Although we* cannot ‘control’ this fact, we have some measure of control over such damage when it is caused primarily by our own interference.

In general, this interference comes in two forms: conversion of resources to commodities, and competition of life systems with the results of the invention and propagation of both machines and other ‘products’.

Conversion of life-systems to objects and machines is analogous to converting one’s own organs into dead objects. There is no way to reverse this process.

While our technologies are engineered in an attempt to ‘solve problems’, it is impossible that they do not invent new problems, and, most often, these problems turn out to be far more dangerous than the ‘solutions’ our technologies (including language) appear to have provided.

It has become transparently clear that (both) the history and future of life on Earth are being obliterated by human* thought, desire and activity. By this I mean that the activities and motivations of our supercultures, in particular, are erasing the »meaning of life on Earth. Changing it into something as ugly as it is unsurvivable.

How can we damage history? Simply by affecting its progeny: the present and future generations. WE must recognize that meaning and results of life’s history on Earth are transformed by our activity in the present. So everything we* do and do not do changes the meaning of history by changing its results…

With a good outcome, these histories are rendered meaningful. With a catastrophic outcome, their meaning is transformed to tragedy. Perhaps forever.

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We have developed astonishing mechanical and cognitive technologies, however, the common, moment-to-moment activities of our supercultures are explicitly unsurvivable. Allowed to continue, they will obliterate most or all of life on Earth, or render the planet largely or completely uninhabitable for animals like ourselves.

Make no mistake: the most complex animals are the most vulnerable to sudden, irreversible changes in the environment.

So while we have complex technologies, these are not (and were never) benefits if they lead to extinction, which is their apparent result. Nothing we have ever done will have been valuable if we wipe out our species or life on Earth. In this case, the ‘meaningfulness’ of the entire living history of the planet will be voided. Similarly, if we can invert these behaviors, we have a shot at giving the entire history of human and organismal life… an entirely new meaning… one that matters.

Our complex technologies can, however, be turned to good and important uses. It is possible, for example, for us to invent together something we have never experienced as a species: the birth of social and relational cultures that are human, humane, intelligent, and capable of nurturing both our species and our world.

We do not need a faster computer or network. We need invest the same amount of energy, concern and attention we deploy in commerce, war and consumerism in the establishment of intelligent human cultures with the capacity to ourcompete and thus extinguish what we have instead. What we have instead is, largely, a nightmare that builds momentum very slowly at first, and accelerates by unexpected leaps until it ends all local histories.

Our supercultures must be replaced with something survivable, and fast… our species must learn to develop intelligent human cultures before the clock we have been arguing over… shatters… forever.

* In this text ‘we’ and ‘our’ refers to a nonreal abstraction of class membership, i.e. ‘humans as a species, in general’.