Nature's Gamble

Intelligence is an evolutionary "all in".  It's nature risking it all at the blackjack table to try and make it rich.

It seems reasonable to deduce that an inevitable result of intelligence is, what we call, society, that's not quite true as a way of manipulating the environment is also needed (in our case hands) but lets look past that for a moment.  Society is the networking and cooperation of "intelligent" organisms to assist each other in the task of survival.  Well sure but that's not gambling that's just one of many evolutionary traits.

The gamble comes into play as soon as that society starts along the technological path.  Its a fast one too, life has existed on earth for approximately 3.5 billion years, intelligent life (in the form of humans) has been around for 3 or 4 million years and we first started to figure out how the world worked 2 or 3 thousand years ago.  So in the timescales of the earth's history our progress from stone age to age of computers and space travel was microscopically small.

But what about that gamble.  Well we've deduced that intelligence leads to society and that (as long as the organism can manipulate its environment) society leads to technological developmental.  Well we can see the results of technological development all around us and to my eyes there are three major results.

The first is that our ability to survive has become incredibly effective, there are now over 7 billion humans on the planet, that's vastly more than could possibly have existed pre-technological development.

The second is that, partly as a result of the massive population, life on earth has taken a beating, even conservative estimates sit at around 20 million species extinct as a direct result of human activity, so the cost of developing intelligence and technology has been incredibly high. And that cost may be higher yet, the threat of global nuclear war destroying ALL life on Earth is almost gone but new threats are a dime a dozen, Global-warming may be just the beginning, as our technology grows so too will our ability to destroy the planet.

The third result of our technological growth is also the potential "pay off" of the gamble.   For the first time in the earths history a species of animals that evolved here has left, in 1969 humans set foot on the moon, in 2023 humans are scheduled to not just set foot on Mars but to LIVE there, for the remainder of there lives.  Technology opens a new doorway to us, a future beyond the earth and, one day, beyond the sun.  Natures Payoff could be to see its children spread out across the stars and seed new life everywhere they go. If we but rise to our challenges and continue along the path of science and progress we will inevitably spread out among the stars, the alternative is death, not for you or me, but for all of humanity.  Even if we survived a nuclear war, or similar catastrophe, we would be sent back to the stone age.  With the surface oil and natural materials needed for early civilization already depleted we would likely not be able to build our great civilization again and would be doomed to die with the earth and the sun, not as great carriers of knowledge and history but as hunter gathers, scratchin in the dirt our our decimated planet.

But if we do succeed, if we do spread out and seed life across the stars; we will bring with us not just the preservation of our DNA but comprehension, history, poetry, and a deep and profound appreciation for the cosmos and our place within it, preserved far beyond the few billion years the sun has left to live -- humanity would be shepherds of knowledge and history for trillions upon trillions of years; perhaps even outliving the universe itself and stretching into infinity.