In biology, we look at habitats as unique ecosystems that provide a specific and necessary niche for an individual population to flourish within that environment. As the environment changes, the species can either change with it, leave the ecosystem or die off.
These rules apply equally from a petri dish of bacterial cultures to a galaxy of species yet to be discovered. We apply names to the observations: survival of the fittest, development adaptation, increased prevalence of most survivable trait… the list goes on but my undergraduate work ended 13 years ago. Suffice to say: for every observable phenomena, we have developed terminology and a method for measuring and predicting what the next big change will be.
What makes less sense to me is how humanity fits in.
In Earth Day emails, company’s use buzzwords to sell more products. Grounds and Hounds, one of my favorite places to waste money, put in their email that Earth was the “only planet with dogs and coffee”. A fact that’s true based on our limited understanding of the universe beyond our planet and limited by our ability to observe.
Yet, effective as a marketing strategy because if you offer me dogs and coffee, I will do just about anything.
You know, except give up my dogs and coffee.
The section of city government I work for planned a river clean-up, and we went out and collected trash Saturday morning. There were easily dozens of other groups doing the same and I feel confident declaring that park and area along the greenbelt immaculate. Most of us brought our dogs and cleaned trash while walking the park for a few hours and truly the most Earth friendly part of it was the fact we were all outside enjoying the Earth.
Then my little introverted hermit went back inside to read, write and drink coffee because… priorities.
A book that often hangs out at the periphery of my subconscious is The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Specifically, the café at the end of the universe and the speculation that Earth and humanity are an experiment to answer the meaning of life, the universe, and everything… which, as you know, is 42.
Looking at the Earth as a big round petri dish, the likelihood of survival depends on your access to resources and individual microbiome of needs. In microbiology, we grew bacterial samples in agar, and what grew depended on what nutrient source (growth medium) was provided, climate conditions, and ability to survive ones neighbors.
We humans are the super bacteria that is edging out everyone else to the nearest food source, but we aren’t invincible. The solar system is centered around the sun, a giant ass star with enough gravitational pull to attract other space rocks with compositions that both can’t escape it and repel the magnetic composition. Like in Elementary School, we created different solar system models based on scales, one that involved a playground sized roll of paper to model the actual distances between the planets, and another that used household objects to create size ratios.
The sun was always a basketball (the biggest ball 90s kids could fathom) and Pluto was always a single sand rock plucked from its fellows with tweezers and childlike concentration. Also, fluff off NASA and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Pluto is damn planet and I will not re-learn the pneumonic to remember planetary names if it can’t end in Pizza. (My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas for those of you who grew up before or after pneumonics were a thing. It only works if you’ve already memorized the names and just can’t remember orbital order… personally I always flip-flopped Neptune and Uranus and drew my P’s backwards but I digress… also hehe anus).
But- the sun is a finite resource. All stars eventually die when they burn up all their gases, and then what? We aren’t really any better equipped to survive without a sun than a bacterial culture is to survive without a heat lamp. The Earth, the solar system, it’s an unbalanced ecosystem that exists exclusively because one flaming space rock attracted a bunch of non-flaming space rocks and at least one of the space rocks had the perfect ratio of growth mediums to produce lower-level organisms, and then higher-level organisms. We can question how or why there is life to our philosophical heart’s content, but our ability to contemplate meaning is meaningless in the grand scheme of a universe that is solely dependent on maintaining a growth medium trifecta to sustain what we call “intelligent life”.
Intelligent life that can’t survive without dogs, cats, birds, lizards, oxygen and coffee… and books, so stop banning those.
Life, the universe, everything, is best looked at as a microscope on the most powerful setting. It’s great to focus on the small and finite details, but you have to change the setting in order to see the system as a whole or you’ll miss out on its purpose and functionality.
Long story short- be nice to the Earth. It’s your agar plate and no matter how much you zoom in to avoid the truth, you can’t survive without it.
Also, it has dogs and coffee.
