''This is chapter 3 of the [[SolSeed book]].''
=== A scientific creation myth ===
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. Eyes did not yet exist, but they arose not long thereafter, along with a slew of other innovations such as circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems, bones and muscles, fins and tails, not to mention photosynthesis, roots, leaves, and seeds. Hundreds of millions of years later, 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.
=== Two ways of living ===
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. We believe that humans should move away from the first solution, away from acting like ours is the only species that matters, and toward the second solution, acting for the benefit of all life in a kind of large-scale, conscious symbiosis.
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.
=== People are animals too ===
What does it mean to reconnect with nature? There are many aspects to this goal, but the most obvious one begins from the realization that there is no intrinsic separation between our species and the rest of the web of life. Taxonomically, we are just another species of mammal, sharing all the traits that define the other mammals, even if we also have some exceptional traits such as complex language and the ability to make many kinds of tools.
It is common to rebel against statements like the above, relegating the behaviors we hold in common with other species to the level of "base animal instincts," and denigrating our bodies for their many frailties. In this view, our unique intelligence is the only thing that really contributes to making us "human rather than animal," as if the two concepts were totally separate. At the extreme, this attitude manifests as a desire to "move out" of our fragile, mortal flesh and become creatures of metal and plastic or disembodied intelligences living in a computer-generated virtual world. Some even refer to the process of building and inhabiting such new forms as "the next step in evolution."
But in reality, our nature as human beings is a combination of body and mind, instinct and learned behavior alike, and all the supposed boundaries between the "higher" and "lower" aspects of our being are imaginary. After all, language, culture, and technology did not appear out of thin air; they arose out of nature, in the form of evolutionary pressures that drove our ancestors to form ever more complex social structures in order to survive, and to develop the brain capacity to keep track of them.
Learning to accept and celebrate our whole beings is also a way of affirming our kinship with many other species that gain energy by consuming food, move using muscles, have skeletons built around a central spine, protect themselves from the elements with hair or fur, bear live young and feed them with milk, and form social groupings because they are stronger together than apart. At the same time, we can recognize and celebrate the many differences among the survival strategies of our closest evolutionary kin, and see that they are no more or less wonderful than those of beings from more distant branchings of the tree of life. In diversity lies life's greatest strength, and we are stronger when working together with the rest of the biosphere than when we place ourselves apart and above it all, aloof in our illusory self-sufficiency.
=== Avoiding the other extreme ===
Every living thing is valuable, but as mentioned above, SolSeed doesn't seek to place ''equal'' value on the life of every organism. Even though we don't see humans as intrinsically, qualitatively "above" the rest of life on Earth, we do accept that humans can and should place a higher value on human lives than the lives of other creatures.
One reason for this is simply pragmatic: as Richard Dawson has observed, genes seek to perpetuate themselves, meaning that any "altruistic" being will focus mostly on helping those with genomes similar to its own--its close relatives and, to a lesser extent, other members of its species. Another biology-focused reason is that unlike many species, whose offspring are numerous because so many of them are expected to die young, human couples have always had relatively few children and placed a high value on trying to keep all of them alive. This becomes even more true in the modern era, where birthrates in much of the world are dropping toward two per couple or even lower.
Finally, we return to the unique traits that make humans such powerful sources of innovation and possibility. Though we may well find that none of these traits is ''qualitatively'' unique--we already know that there are other animals that communicate, cooperate in complex ways, even make and use tools--still, there is no question that the exceptional intelligence and creativity of human beings has created amazing and unprecedented new forms of diversity: cultural, technological, artistic, and ideological diversity, just to name a few. We can't help but value ourselves highly for this capability, even as the pace of development of new ideas and capabilities threatens to accelerate beyond all control. In some ways it's a beautiful problem to have: the world is in danger of plunging into a deadly chaos caused by ''too much creativity.'' We must not fall into the trap of valuing this creativity above all else, and claiming that slowing the rate of progress is always wrong, even if it's necessary to prevent global catastrophe. But to have all that possibility available is undoubtedly a wonderful thing.
=== Will global warming and peak oil force a halt to progress? ===
Conservatives often criticize proposals to protect the environment on the grounds that "they will damage the economy." Recently, environmentalists have come up with a counterargument about how innovative green technologies will lead to millions of "green-collar jobs" and make the economy stronger.
But neither of these arguments takes into account the onrushing consequences of our failure to establish a sustainable civilization. Our current economy only works in the presence of a cheap energy source and a reasonably stable climate, yet our fossil-fuel-based energy systems are threatening both of these. We have probably already passed "peak oil," the point at which new oil discoveries become less and less frequent and the oil in the ground becomes increasingly difficult to extract. Likewise, global warming is already well underway and causing massive disruptions--stronger hurricanes, bigger wildfires, more droughts and floods, etc--that take vast amounts of effort and money to recover from.
Al Gore's answer to all this is that we must "solve the climate crisis" by transitioning to clean, renewable energy sources, which will also eliminate the problem of limited fossil-fuel supplies. But it's starting to look as though that can't happen fast enough to return us to the stable, temperate climate we're used to. This situation has given rise to the Transition movement, which seeks to prepare us for global-warming adaptation and "energy descent" by scaling back the scope of human endeavor. Transition advocates for localizing economics and politics, so each community is less dependent on world-girdling supply lines that may be cut due to increasingly common weather-related disasters. They also propose replacing some oil-powered machinery, not with futuristic electric devices driven by solar energy, but with a return to manual labor.
Naturally, this kind of plan bodes ill for the SolSeed Destiny. How would there be any room for space exploration and colonization efforts in a scaled-back world whose remaining large-scale resources are dedicated to coping with a permanent climate crisis?