Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Natural (&) Humanity


the journey ongoing


It's been nearly 10 years since I scribbed my thoughts on the relationship between human and nature. It's a worthy reflection. Check out the short essay here: Human (&) Nature.

Natural and artificial can seem like opposites, alas where does one draw the line between the two. Humans were spawned by nature and we've come up with some creative "artificial" solutions: tools, protocols, culture, fictional stories, and ever improving intelligent systems that operate more less independently from our control. 

Frankly, many of homo sapiens' creative cousins have leveraged their skills to create tools, protocols, and culture. Perhaps, the only thing keeping other species from rising to challenge humanity's planetary hegemony, it's their inability to effectively communicate complex ideas across generations. If the birds ever gain tree notch codes or octopuses modular digital storage, the human super powers better watch out.

Nevertheless, humanity has its roots in natural origins. Evolution by natural selection is nature's protocol for sharing information forward. It relies on reproductive profligacy. The genes within the DNA of all Earth life are complex and in sufficient numbers have found solutions sufficient to iterate morphology across millennia. Still, DNA mutation and invoked fitness over time are simply analogous to the angle of repose, in which given the physical laws in play a self-ordering complexity emerges. 

That complexity will undulate over time. Look forward four to five billion years and our whole solar system will be a stellar nova unlikely to support life as we know it. Humanity itself may very well perish in spite of its highly adaptive skills. It seems quite likely we will push numerous other species over the cliff of extinction as our tribal nature sends much of this planet's balance spinning out of control.

With a deep sigh, any one of us as individuals can feel powerless to help return balance to the midterm future. Certainly, we can contemplate ethical stances or blindly pick one that our elders have passed down in writing. Our planet is a connected ecosystem that has shown no sign of supernatural gods or powerful extraterrestrials coming to our rescue. Sadly, humanity seems to have a natural tendency away from unified action. We are the proverbial unherdable collection of cats.

So can humanity find its natural place and prevent implosion, explosion, or simple deterioration? Only time will tell, and though it is not very satisfying, that will be the natural order of things (not good or evil, but indifferently natural), for in hindsight what has happened is the evidence at core of what is. What has yet to happen in our world, on the other hand, begins with what each of us (all sentient creatures included) does now combined with everything else that is happening (motion, forces, matter, et al) around us.

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