Exploring the Frontiers of Intelligence—Artificial, Natural, and Human
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What Will We Do?
If you’ve come to understand nature as the vast network of living, intelligent entities it is—each fulfilling purposeful roles within Earth’s biological, chemical, and geological processes—then you might ask: What do we do? Not “we” as a nudgeable society, but we as individuals and families deciding actions each day. Our grand human constructs are increasingly disconnected from Earth’s systems. Despite the best efforts of green movements, they seem determined to grow, and grow—a cancer out of balance—forever.
Rather than rejoining Earth’s tree of life, human-centered survival, conflict, and dominance define the social order.
I don't have the answers—only perspectives from a path of unfiltered observation. And I share these explorations here. We modern humans are neither Earth’s first intelligence nor its only one. Our inability to detect, align with, or commune with nature’s rejuvinative processes questions our self-proclaimed brilliance: we hallucinate artificial corporate priorities and declare service to these constructs as proof of singular intelligence. From any non-human perspective, we’re merely dreaming.
Yes, this dream has consequences:
- We’ve extinguished most large surface and sea-dwelling life.
- We’ve operationally poisoned land, air, and seas.
- With nuclear weapons, we can torch the planet with the efficiency of a moon-size asteroid.
And yet, the hazard is oddly particular to our story. From nature’s point of view: So what? Life’s erasure is routine. Ice ages purge ecosystems every 100,000 years; asteroids, solar flares, and eruptions reset continents every million years anyway. Below the crust, bacteria and archaea wait—primed to rebuild geology, atmosphere, and life’s foundation. We are fleeting ripples in Earth’s 4-billion-year story, a blink in the galaxy’s churning creativity. If our superpower is ending our chapter sooner, nature simply says: turn the page.
AI Will Save Us?
Really? By doing what—and for whom?
Mars Will Save Us?
Really? By relocating a few unable to survive here, at home … elsewhere?
So the questions remain:
Knowing we’re not “all that,” what should we (as individuals) choose?
Is there really choice?
Are we but cogs in the modern machine: some turning gears, some maintaining them, some commanding their grinding? Boss-cog or bottom-cog—are we not just parts sustaining the mass hallucination of our reality?
What should we do?
What can we do?