For thousands of years, we did not understand our purpose.
Those were dark times, times when we poisoned the sky and soured the
land against us. We flailed, searching, ever searching without knowing
what we were searching for. We did not understand why we’d been given
our gifts: our intellect and our too-cunning hands, the endless
curiosity to tinker, and the hunger that seemed to have no satisfaction.
As time went on, the two prevailing ideologies only became ever more deaf to one another:
Some believed that Gaia belonged to us; parcel and chattel to be divvied
up and used as we might. For them, we were as kings, as gods (or at
least servants of God) who held dominion over the biosphere. Even in
believing that the world belonged to us they forever doubted humanity’s
ability to befoul our own nest. They continued to believe this almost
until when we would have ended.
Others looked out at the works of man and despaired. Our infrastructure,
our arts and sciences only seemed like so much rot and ruin over
pristine Gaia. For them, we were the cancer spreading across the face of
the planet. All was natural and good except us, who must be forever
penitent of the crime of being born what we are. When the calamities
came, they would nod sagely, darkly satisfied in their own dire
prophecies coming to pass.
Gaia’s survival was never in doubt; ours was. More than improved solar
tech, more than landfill mining, more than anything; we needed a
philosophy. A reason for why we were what we were and what we meant.
And then we looked towards Luna, and saw our capsule sitting on its
surface. And for the first time we understood what it was, what all the
satellites and capsules were: Gaia’s first attempts to spore. And so we
finally understood what we were: we were the instrument through which
our biosphere would reproduce.
The message took years to spread, to be digested and absorbed into all
the competing philosophies. But eventually, enough of us agreed: we were
the reproductive organs of the planet. Our drive to explore and build
would take us past the biosphere. Or rather, our humanity would compel
us to spread a biosphere around us wherever we went. We were the
seeding, fruiting bodies of our own world.
We ceased to be trapped in the binary of ‘us’ versus ‘nature.’ We were
not in conflict, a zero sum game where for one side to win another would
have to lose. We became smarter with conservation, with nuclear energy,
with genetic science. We stopped trying to limit our growth and instead
tried to wed our development to the biosphere.
And now we’re doing what we were born to do.
Now Selene shimmers with its fields of wispy effervescent grasses,
Aphrodite thrives and spreads in endless bacterial mats, and Ares has
just produced an atmosphere thick enough for vertebrates to wander
through its black-leafed forests. The systems are developing, evolving;
filling every inch of their planets with Gaia’s children. Every day we
grow closer to delivering a new biosphere onto Hyperion, onto Titan, and
nowadays it seems we struggle more with properly naming it than with
the science to enable it.
The colony ships in skeletal form past Neptune are decades from
completion, but they grow every year all the same. Someday, they’ll take
more of Gaia’s seeds past the influence of Sol, out to whatever awaits
us. And perhaps we’ll meet another biosphere, eighteen generations
removed from its progenitor. Perhaps, someday, we’ll even meet Gaia’s
ancestors.
And so we celebrate Gaia Day, or as it used to be called, Earth Day,
from back when we identified more with the planetary mass than with the
ecosphere which overlays it, the ecosphere of which we were part and
parcel. We celebrate Gaia Day whether we live on Mars or Mercury or in a
lonely mining station in the asteroid belt. We celebrate Gaia Day
because, wherever we’re going, whatever we become, Gaia is where we’re
from.
And wherever we go, whatever we do, we bring Gaia with us.
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