Expansion is the way of the cosmos from the beginning of time, whether light or life, so why wouldn’t Nature be wired to expand beyond Earth?
When seeking to find the environmental Holy Grail of “an ecologically sustainable society living a globally equitable lifestyle”, a concept promoted by the Australian ecologist Charles Birch in the 1970s, I searched the Earth and could see all the pieces, but not how they went together to form a map to show where the Grail could be found.
Like a shaft of light through a forest glade, in 1993 I heard William Takaku say one winter evening on the ABC’s Radio National, “Nature is culture. We must learn from Nature. When man sees himself as separate from Nature, he is doomed.”
At the time William was the director of the Papuan National Theatre Company and had been travelling through the forests and mountains, shores and villages of Papua New Guinea collecting traditional stories from the many cultures of this ancient land.
Being accustomed to Western science, I applied William’s words to the modern scientific view of Nature and evolution, where cosmology and philosophy reveal different windows into the truth about Nature.
I considered how Edwin Hubble looked out into the Universe in the 1920s and found that all those fuzzy nebulas were in fact other galaxies and the cosmos in which we lived suddenly became a very much larger place.
Hubble went on to find that all other galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way and the further away they were, the faster they were moving; a most amazing discovery that would determine the path of the new scientific disciplines of astrophysics and cosmology.
Cosmologists were very tempted to wind the clock back and being scientists, they couldn’t help themselves, to discover what conditions were like in the early Universe.
The results of the investigations over many decades have shaken out a general consensus that the cosmos is around 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few human life-spans; but far more astounding was the detail that all that is began as an infinitely small point, that swiftly stretched like the surface of a balloon to become the infinite Universe that we now see stretched out around us.
This infinitely small point, or singularity, is like a seed that contains all the information and energy that would find expression in the evolution of our cosmos.
Questions arise about what the singularity occurred in and cosmologists tackle this with gusto, speculating about a vast multi-verse, in which our Universe is just one of a potentially infinite number of other cosmoses in the super-cosmos.
The story then became rather dramatic, with the hottest of hot fires in which all the energy that would be expanded in the brightest of bright lights, with matter only forming from the primordial plasma when the Universe had cooled down sufficiently.
How the birth event of the cosmos gained its name is a bit of a literary crime against humanity and perhaps an international competition should be held to fix the faux pas: as when the physicist and science fiction writer heard the story the cosmologists were revealing, he dubbed the event the Big Bang as a form of ridicule, as until his dying day he could never accept that all that is emerged from an infinitely small point.
With his passing Fred Hoyle’s term remains, but the science marches on as science does, revealing the wonders of Nature, as Darwin did with the theory of evolution, casting out creationist views from the halls of science and showing that the steady process of natural selection determined the emergence of new species in the pageant of life.
Finding that events in Nature, as with evolution, can happen with tiny shifts over many ages to deliver new species of life, a view became entrenched that all of nature must be like this and with the astounding successes of the scientific method in revealing the truth about the Universe, it would only be a matter of time before it was revealed that tiny changes over time would be shown to be the cause of everything.
The outcome of this view is to see humans as just another animal, because the upright ape has demonstrably emerged through evolution during the past 4 million years and being just an animal, has no consequence more than any other beast; which leads to a view of the world that sees nothing special about the presence of humans on Earth.
The outcome of such a perspective is that like any other animal, we can do as we please and we certainly have, with our demands for energy and resources reaching plague proportions on this planet, even beginning to kill the Earth; it is as if the whole World is now an Easter Island, where a Polynesian community once had a growth industry in statue building, but lost the plot, cut down all the trees, became a plague on their island and lost the lot in an orgy of civil war, rapine and cannibalism when their tiny civilization collapsed.
With our amazing global civilization now demanding 150 per cent of the Earth’s resources, a sum that is racing toward 200 per cent by 2030, what would life be like on this Earth in the wake of the bursting of this unsustainable bubble that we are blowing?
If it possible to tell a more noble story of humanities role in Nature, we may be able to inspire a better outcome for our world than the fate that befell the Easter Island civilization; and a great many other societies that have met the end through history by becoming a plague on the Earth.
I followed William’s eyes and looked into the heart of Nature, through the forests and streams to the birth of our cosmos; and it became evident that all the laws of Nature were in full working order at the birth of the Universe; they did not evolve, but were contained in the primal singularity as if it were a seed that fell from a tree in the forest and took root, to begin to grow and become another mighty tree.
With the expansion and cooling of the primal plazma of energy, matter emerged, that formed the first stars, that exploded to spread the heavier elements as star dust into space, that would gather around later stars to form rocky planets; and on one such planet life emerged and through life a conscious species that was released from many of the bonds of instinct that control all other life, a species that looked out to the stars and wondered, that developed technology and applied their hands to the energy of light to run machines; that built cathedral towers that defied gravity to reach the heavens and skyscrapers that reached higher and built a mighty rocket that took humanity beyond the clutches of Earth’s gravity to step onto the Moon.
Science cannot explain what the real nature of the multi-verse is, or why the laws of nature were in full working order at the dawn of time, or how life emerged on Earth, or why consciousness sparked that was liberated from many instinctive bonds to use the bounty of the Earth to reach the Moon; but here we are and here we may be doomed, unless we awaken to some reason to do more that run like rodents in plague proportions across the Earth.
In this extraordinary pageant of events spanning out from the beginning of time, we may like to stop and ponder why it was that humanity was still a sustainable presence on this planet in 1969 when Neil Armstrong made “one small step for man” upon the Moon?
It was as if life on Earth had reached the point of giving birth to life beyond Earth and all we had to do was run with Nature, into a future that was wired into the laws of the cosmos from when it was a tiny seed about to sprout; that the time had arrived for life to expand beyond Earth and the conscious species that had been liberated from many of the bonds of evolution was the means of Nature’s fate and destiny.
Like blind subterranean rats, we did not see in 1969 what the cost would be of failing to run with Nature beyond Earth in a much greater adventure of life and so we largely sunk beneath the atmosphere to overpopulate, become unsustainable and burn so much carbon fuel that we may see the Earth begin to become a second Venus, where the rocks glow in the heat and pressure of the Venusian hell.
As William said, “When man sees himself as separate from Nature, he is doomed.” and for us in the modern scientific age, we have failed to see our role in Nature that will allow a much more exciting future for all Earth’s children; if we find the will and still have time to act.
I had found the environmental Holy Grail and it was in the heart of Nature; it was the Sun that we must reach to for energy, by building solar power stations in space to access the unlimited energy well of our star and begin the great adventure beyond Earth.
When I looked across the Solar System, all the pieces fell into place of a map revealing a safe and wonderful future for humanity; and also a healthy Earth was revealed, if we would lift our game from an Earth-based carbon economy to a star-faring Solar Civilization.
We will need to act swiftly to build those solar power stations in space, so that we will have the energy to mine excess carbon from the air as quickly as possible, to prevent our planet becoming a second Venus; and if this does begin to happen, we will also have the energy to build our way through any crisis and avoid a great loss of human life.
With unbridled access to stellar energy, we will be able to desalinate any volume of ocean water and pump this liquid gold to any location, where people will need energy and water to survive and keep cool; and if the oceans begin to die and release toxic hydrogen sulphide into the air that can kill life on land and destroy the ozone layer, we will be able to build protected environments that also serve as arks for life; until using the muscle of space technology, we can make the planet safe again; and evolution will replenish the Earth from the sixth great extinction that our clinging to the Earthly nest has brought on with a vengeance.
We have walked on the Moon and seen no roads built by the angels and looked across the cosmos and seen no sign of life; so until we have clear evidence that the story is otherwise, we must face the prospect that we could be alone in this vast Universe; there may be other conscious species out there, or there may be many civilizations that have reached where we are now, only to fail the test and fall into oblivion in a Venusian hell of their own making, when they caused the death by stillbirth of life on their planet.
Like any seed that has become a tree and produced fruit, we are simply the strange fruit of this vast cosmic tree, even of the vaster forest of the super-cosmos; and unless we awaken to our role in Nature and in super-Nature and learn to run with life beyond Earth, our fate may be to rot on the branches of our world tree through inaction; any survivors running like rats to eat all that they can, until there is nothing left but the husk of a lost civilization.
We can do better than that, if we awaken and act and reach out to the Holy Grail of the Sun and allow our planet to give birth to life beyond Earth, press on to help her recover from the near-death experience of a still-birth and deliver a healthy life for all Earth’s children; and begin our great adventure among the stars that we have for too long neglected.
The reward of success will be the laughter of children playing in the surf and the Sun on the beaches of Earth, living in a mature and cultured civilization that has stretched out from it’s nest to build cities in space across the Solar System; and begin the great adventure of sailing the vast oceans between the stars.
The findings of my search for the environmental Holy Grail are included in my 2006 article ‘Creating A Solar Civilization’
http://www.tdf.it/2006/2/peart_eng.htm
