ExoBiology

[Inspired by Dr. Timothy Leary's book, Exo-Psycholgy.]

The patterns of nature have revealed themselves to be fractal and self-repeating. The morphology of one level is reflected in all levels, from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. The classic example is the shoreline, recursive and self-referential, carving the same odd wandering line whether you're looking at the rocky cliff edge from a few feet away or from several miles above. Similarly the small leaves on the frond of a fern trace the same contour as the frond itself, and the fern as a whole. Or consider the swirl of water around the drain and the swirl of the Milky Way around the massive black hole at its core. Indeed, there's a certain simple economy in nature, deploying basic rules across vast scales.

Nature is of course dynamic and the processes that transcribe these fractal morphologies are themselves iterative and self-similar. The development of the fern leaf follows a pattern that continues at the level of the frond and the entire fern. As the planets orbit our Sun, so too does our Sun orbit the galactic center. Our galaxy itself might be orbiting around the center of a local cluster. The same process - gravity and centrifugal motion - governs each level.

Life on Earth has demonstrated it's incessant ability to spread into any possible crack and crevice available. It is impossibly persistent and adaptive, evolving and migrating ceaselessly. It would seem that this is a fundamental law of the imperative of life. It just keeps going. If life migrates and adapts from one rock to another, region to region, climate to climate, the notion of self-similarity across scales implies that the same persistence would carry life from the womb of Earth off into space across the heavens until it finds an appropriate substrate in which to flourish further.

While the vacuum of space is certainly highly intolerant of carbon-based life-forms dependent upon oxygen and ill-equipped to defend against the onslaughts of unshielded solar radiation, it is perhaps helpful to consider that the only thing necessary to establish a brand new colony of life is the fundamental template - the genetic code of DNA. If the code lands in the right soup at the right time, another Cambrian explosion will likely follow. And in what we presume to be a near-infinite universe, it's only a matter of time before a fitting new womb is found. Looking down from above, one can imagine a pattern of minute bits of carbon-based genetic life migrating from planet to planet, caught on solar winds or bound in meteorites or hurtling in fuel-burning rocketry waiting to strike fallow extra-terrestrial earth.

From this level, life is much more than the individual egosomatic corporeality we mull about in day to day; more than the humble biota of our home, this third stone from the Sun. In fact, we're merely vectors, hosts for the virus of DNA. Or perhaps more poetically, the life of our planet in which we're enmeshed is just one song of a wandering minstrel passing through galaxies singing to the stars.

The transience of life we perceive and fear is only our identification with this corporeal incarnation. Everything we identify with here on Earth will ultimately perish. Thus the bittersweet moment of our human drama. Yet there's immortality stewing in our genes, passing through us like a ghost breathing life with our lungs and pumping blood with our hearts. And then it's gone. But, hopefully, not before it's been passed along to the progeny. Another carrier, another note in the song of life.

Exobiology is the study of galactic life. Exopsychology is the cognitive awareness of the post-terrestrial human. If DNA is impelled to migrate off the planet, then it follows that it may very well co-opt the abilities of it's tool-wielding, large forebrained prodigal apes to carry it out into space. The vast tracts of seemingly useless DNA in our genome may simply be dormant sections of future adaptations designed to enable long-distance, high-velocity, zero-g space travel. We may just be the caterpillar trying to anticipate and imagine it's future evolution as the butterfly. It's certainly more appealing than the thought of terrestrial life making the galactic leap on the fiery debris of a demolished Earth, victim of some wayward asteroid or nuclear apocalypse.

Our evolution now finds us at the dawn of a new millenium, seemingly quite advanced as toolmakers, yet faltering in socioeconomic and territorial games. The addictions of industrialism are drying up, impelling us towards newer technologies and efficiencies. Global networks are quickly wiring humanity for simultaneous communication and access to the data of creation and the technologies of post-history. Humans are leaving the larval phase, waking up to the somatosensory capabilities of our bodies. Interpersonal communicative and sensual fusion is increasingly common with the aid of mind and body altering technologies, nearing the simultaneity and unity of telepathic communion. Perhaps we'll have new humans among us with a little less dormant genetics and a little more neurogenetic capacity, modded out with cyborg gadgetry and buzzing with light to fly away from the hive.

What is our future? What is our purpose? Where are we going? What are we? These are the important questions whose answers reside in both inner and outer space. Stabilize the larval terrestrial game, actualize the somatosensory organism, and acknowledge the cellular, atomic, and genetic imperatives of life so we can disengage, jump the gap, and carry life to the stars.

Posted by LVX23 at January 29, 2005 11:05 PM | TrackBack