Life and Its Legacy

The world all around us is the result of the activity of many different types of beings both living and once alive, except of course for all the “dead” rock composing the bulk of the planet Earth. But given our earlier observations about life creating non-life can we be justified in considering the Earth to be a living being which has shed its dying parts into non-living rocks?

Intuitive scientific thinking asks, “Is it possible that what we experience as 'dead rock' might be the hardened remains of a living being whose scale is on a completely different order than human beings?” The simple answer to this is yes.

That anyone would consider the answer to be anything other than a simple yes is due to our human tendency to abstract ourselves out of the questions we’re considering. Human beings typically do this to in an attempt to arrive at some form of “objectivity” about the issue in question.

Generally, people are also used to seeing their own interests pitted against those of the environment around them. We’re so conditioned to this attitude; we almost never consider our own activity is only a part of the larger living Earth that sustains us.

If instead we see human beings as one of the types of life activity on the planet and if we add to this all the other types of life activity then we would have to say yes the planet Earth is composed of living being(s) that transform and shed their matter as their environment.

That the Earth is alive is the most obvious conclusion since we too are alive and we live here. Even the hypothesis that human life may have originated elsewhere than on Earth but is able to flourish here, simply obscures the fundamental issue that life could only originate in an environment able to sustain life. Placing the origin of life on another planet doesn’t address the question of life’s origins on planets in general.