CoGE and the Meaning of Life
Gaia asks nothing of her member species except that they fulfill the requirements of their niche, the role they evolved to peform in the ecosystem. For most species, this neatly answers the question "Why are we here?": Your purpose is to do your part to ensure that the biosphere remains in dynamic equilibrium, as do the broader environmental conditions that allow life to exist.
But humans grew out of our old niche as smart omnivores on the African savannah a long time ago. We had found something of a balance there over the previous few million years, which is why most of the surviving megafauna (creatures much bigger than us) are in Africa today. As we expanded into other ecosystems, our culture and technology often changed so rapidly that we hunted those species to extinction before we realized that we could.
And now we have a much bigger problem. As a global civilization, up until recently we haven't been anything like good team players with the rest of Gaia; we just wanted to control the whole world, to take what we wanted from it without ever having to do anything for the biosphere in return. Now that we're finally awakening from this impossible dream of perfect tyrannical dominance over nature, the question becomes: what is our new role to be? We can't go back to what we were, and Gaia isn't about to tell us directly what to do in a booming voice from the sky. So we have to figure out on our own how to make civilization fit into a new niche. That's our current purpose in life, as Gaia would define it.
Recently, the human race has been acting in a manner flagrantly contrary to Gaia's interests, disrupting the climate, introducing toxins into the environment, and eliminating habitat or directly killing off species that played important roles in maintaining the balance and the cycles that sustain Life. Civilization can't change completely overnight, so the first imperative is to try to reconfigure what we already do so that it's done in a way that sustains Gaia rather than continuing to damage Her. Hence, we will still have cities, but new and existing buildings will be constructed using sustainably farmed or recycled wood, powered using solar and wind energy rather than coal, and so on. And we will still have roads, but the cars that drive on them will be made of recycled metal and powered by electricity from the same renewable sources, and there will be "overpasses" built expressly for use as wildlife corridors to knit the fractured wilderness back together.
But doing only as much as necessary to make civilization fit back into Gaia's original "grand plan" is not enough to redress the great damage we've done. We need to give back something larger, and that's where The Destiny of Earthseed comes in. Probably there is no real plan, just an organically evolved system that just naturally does Her best to keep Herself alive--but if there were a purpose for our intelligence, it would probably be just this: We can bring Life to other worlds, thus ensuring its survival far into the future, even after Gaia Herself dies.
--Scifiben 18:51, 9 August 2008 (PDT)
