Who Speaks for Earth?

Who Speaks for Earth?

How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our might Desings, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes, who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot (Christian Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, circa 1690).

We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and the walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew, we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries… It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Life on Earth. Photo by Elena

It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening…

Out of our lineage, mind will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when being, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.

(Herbert G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future” Nature 65, 326 (1902)

To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes? (A question put to Pythogaras by Anaximenes (circe 600 B.C.), according to Montaigne. Image Jaime Murray as H.G.Wells in Warehouse 12 TV series