''This is chapter 3 of the [[SolSeed book]].''
Billions of years ago, a world coalesced out of tiny bits of dust and pieces of floating rock. Not long after the larger rocks stopped crashing into it, melting and re-melting its surface, life arose on the newly solid surface--perhaps under newly formed oceans, perhaps in tide pools--the details aren't important. What matters is that tiny submicroscopic primitive cells began building a vast world-spanning system of feedback loops and cycles. These early organisms eventually began to transform their hostile environment even as it drove them to adapt and evolve their capabilities. Thus life began to create the conditions for more life. James Lovelock refers to this system of planetary feedback between life and its environment, each constantly reshaping the other, as Gaia. In the context of the Destiny, we refer to this unified "body of all life on Earth" as SolSeed, an entity which will one day reproduce and seed the Galaxy with life.
After billions of years, small groups of cells began working together even more closely and formed creatures one could see with the naked eye--though eyes did not yet exist--and a half-billion years after that, Homo sapiens appeared among the countless millions of endlessly diverse species.
The lessons we take from this story, a creation myth buttressed by decades of accumulated evidence, vary depending on how we see ourselves. At one extreme are those who presume that because of our great intelligence, humans are the pinnacle of evolution and destined to dominate the other species, destroying any that inconvenience us and re-engineering others to serve our will. At the other extreme are those who equate the value of a human life with that of a bacterium.
SolSeed stands somewhere in between. We believe that humanity has several very special contributions to make in the cause of advancing life, but that we should see ourselves as partners with the rest of nature rather than absolute rulers. The SolSeed Destiny is envisioned as a joint venture of humans and other species for the benefit of all.
As Paul Krafel describes in his film "The Upward Spiral," within life there are two solutions to the problem of entropy. The first solution we call the "get mine" solution. In "get mine" a living organism takes in whatever it needs and spews out its waste without regard for the effects on other organisms. There is nothing inherently wrong with "get mine." In fact, Krafel makes the point that this solution to the problem of entropy is "ancient and venerable" and will always be a characteristic of life.
While we appreciate the necessity of "get mine", it is the second solution to the problem of entropy by which we are most inspired. The second, "grow ours," solution is where life creates the conditions for ever more complex forms of life.
Given where we are right now, it's easy to doubt that we can ever spread this attitude to significant numbers of people, or even that we can become more benevolent dictators. But the SolSeed movement tends to be in the mindset of celebrating life and positive possibilities rather than fearing death and destruction. There really are lots of scenarios of the future that are very unattractive, and it is easy to use fear of a dystopian/apocalyptic future to motivate people. The problem with fear as a motivator is that it's pretty unsustainable (and we love sustainability, because without it we will never reach the Destiny). When the worst fails to occur, the fear-based motivation becomes "crying wolf" and lures a community into complacency. Also, fear is a rather ugly motivator that doesn't bring out the most creative, generative, best parts of us. People defensively react to fear, whereas hope can make us proactive and is far more likely to drive positive change.
In the spirit of celebrating life and living from abundance, we prefer to be motivated by the image of a thriving Gaia (or SolSeed) flowering out into space. This way of thinking also avoids the sorts of spreadsheet arguments about the "morally correct" items to be spending our resources on. Gaia flowering out into space is not about "doing the right thing". Gaia flowering into space is about the exuberant, unstoppable enthusiasm for life to materialize greater and greater possibilities.