Fermi’s Paradox – Section #1

Table of Contents

PART I: TECHNOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

THE PURPOSES OF EVOLUTION

FOREWORD

This book is holographic in its construction. It may be read from beginning to end. It may also be read in sections. It may be sampled or scrutinized at depth. With some exceptions in the beginning chapters, it is written and organized so that smaller sections and chapters stand as representations of the whole. To accommodate WordPress limitations, this book has been published in five sections. This is the first section.

This book does not aim for scientific reliability or logical proofs. Its ideas are speculative in nature and based upon analogous reasoning. It speaks to possibility.  Yet what advances any debate are ideas which often prove speculative, and almost always controversial, at first. They involve ideas that are not provable, at least with present knowledge and methods.

This manuscript deals with science and the scientific worldview. We discuss science in part because this relatively new form of knowledge, in comparison to older forms of knowing, offers fresh perspectives and solutions to age old problems. But in this manuscript, we also look at science and its worldview because it has become the dominant worldview and seems to have crowded out and displaced older if less rigorous disciplines. The scientific method, by its nature, excludes the veracity of nonfalsifiable evidence which cannot be confirmed by experiment.

Humans, we hold, have a capacity for faith, a word which we do not use here in a religious sense. We simply state the obvious: that most of the evidence upon which humanity acts is actually assumed, rather than proved. It is believed, rather than rigorously deduced. This holds true for scientific ‘evidence’ as well. There is, therefore, an inherent, fundamental ambiguity in human knowledge. While we seek clarity, the net certainty of what humanity knows collectively does not increase over time. It may seem to, but the more that is discovered and known, the more questions that arise. The more humanity discovers, the more it sees that lies undiscovered. The horizon of certainty and of full knowledge retreats. In the age of Isaac Newton, humans thought we had discovered the fundamental laws of mechanics. While these hold true for the gross movement of celestial bodies, for example, and for objects on the scale of everyday human experience, no one in Newton’s time could have fathomed the general or special theories of relativity or the conclusions drawn out from quantum mechanics. The horizon of the cosmos may always recede before us, and we may be consigned to remain the hunters of its secrets, explorers always tempted toward the obsession that ultimate truth lies just over the next horizon. We sometimes act as if, knowing that numbers themselves are without limit, we attempt to understand them and to reach their very end by continuing to count them.

The faith humanity has today seems placed greatly in materialism (in the philosophical sense of the word), in reductionism, and in reason. It invests its assumptions in the verity of science and technology, which are outgrowths of the materialist worldview. The prevailing wisdom places its faith in the idea that science and technical ingenuity can solve the problems besetting humanity. However, in this book, we hold that, based upon the very principles science itself has discovered and enshrined, this is an impossibility. This is especially true since science and technology have contributed to some of the very problems for which scientific and technological fixes are sought.

In the main, this book is about balance. In writing it, we seek to encourage a balance of understanding, and a consilience of all ways of knowing in a grand unified epistemology. It makes little difference whether you believe that the solutions proposed in this book will work. We simply encourage the reader to be open. More depends on the questions asked than on the answers given.

PART I: TECHNOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

I’d like you to consider something: that we are conduits, and not end states.

For the most part, humans and other animals (to the extent that animals are self-conscious) consider themselves as end states. For each individual, its own survival is paramount. Even if we think of others, we often do so secondarily, as means to the end of our own survival or happiness. To the lion, the gazelle is a meal. To a conman, the mark is a meal ticket.

Yet we’re also conduits. In a way, human beings and other living bodies are vessels for the transportation of matter and energy around the planet. We act as transfer devices for moving mass and energy from one point to another within the biome. In the past, organisms acted as unconscious agents to achieve balance within an environment. If there were too many of a certain prey species, and it threatened to crash the biome within which that group operated, then predators helped rebalance the ecosystem by culling the prey that threatened to throw everything out of balance. Until our arrival as a species, this balance was more or less maintained. When great imbalances occurred, Gaia, the earth as an organism, found ways to wipe the slate clean through mechanisms like mass extinctions. Balance was restored.

Organisms didn’t realize it, of course, but they acted as agents of balance, moving food and waste, mass and energy from one part of the earth to another. The evolution of our species changed this dynamic in two ways. First, we realized that we were conduits, at least some of us did. Second, we destroyed the balance. And we destroyed the balance because most of us continued to see ourselves the way other organisms do: as ends, whose survival justified any means deployed to survive and thrive.

Yet at their highest levels of awareness, humans do realize that we are each channels, and not the end in itself. Look at the Prayer of St. Francis. It begins like this: Lord, make me a channel of your peace. If you’d rather not think of God or prayer as having a role in all this, that’s fine. Then look at pure, random biology. Trees represent the whole, but they are obviously composed of parts, of roots and a trunk and limbs and branches and twigs and leaves. Each of these parts seems alive in its own right, and each part may be alive. But no part can survive on its own. Each element of a tree acts on behalf of the greater whole. Each part of a tree transports water and nutrients and in a sense breathes and drinks for the whole. In our own bodies, cells are living things, yet they produce energy and remove waste and distribute these products and byproducts throughout the whole body, for the benefit of the whole. In fact, these cells don’t have an existence independent of the whole and couldn’t survive without it.

The observation that parts serve as conduits for the whole isn’t confined to things we regard as alive. Rivers transport nutrients and waste, moving mass from one point on the globe to another. So do the currents in oceans and lakes and the vast atmospheric gyres which circulate on a global scale. Even the plumbing of the earth – its tectonic plates and volcanoes – circulates planetary energy in the form of heat, recycling rock waste by pumping it deep into the planet’s interior, where the rock is metamorphized into something else before it’s recirculated back to the surface through the process of eruption. So you see, everything is a conduit, a vessel, a means to an end. Even in the larger cosmos, this process of recycling and recirculation takes place, with stars cooking gasses into plasmas, then eventually exploding in novae, which form great gas clouds that accrete into stellar nurseries and planetary bodies, where life has evolved on at least one such body as a means of efficient redistribution of matter and energy on its planetary surface.

We humans are in a unique position. We realize this process takes place. We observe it. And we forget it. And by forgetting that we’re conduits, by seeing ourselves instead as end states for which the whole was designed, we wreck the whole.

That from which we evolved, the animals, must survive. And by focusing on their own survival, their forms and behaviors are perfected through the engine of evolution. Yet then evolution produced us. And the very self-interest which survival through natural selection requires has begun to defeat the process of evolution. We are destroying ourselves and the planet which gave rise to us.

Some believe that evolution is purposeful, though most evolutionary biologists might say that its mechanisms are entirely random. Regardless of your own beliefs, humans are in a unique position to understand both evolution’s processes and its ends. And that end, I maintain, is balance. Yet the same brains which allow us to understand that balance are also responsible for creating the imbalances which threaten the earth today.

A change is required. Instead of yoking our powers to the instinct to survive, we have the opportunity to ‘step out of evolution.’ We can see ourselves, not as ends which the system called earth is meant to serve. But rather as means, as conduits of balance meant to keep the system called Gaia in balance and harmony.

The choice is ours.

THE PURPOSES OF EVOLUTION

Introduction

Biologically-derived intelligence is the result of countless adaptive responses to external conditions. Intelligence is not, merely by virtue of the fact of its evolvement, capable of furnishing the optimal survival responses to these conditions.

Pure intelligence is a power which, if left unbridled, tends towards excess and towards its own destruction. Intellectual understanding alone, not suffused with other ways of knowing, leads to the development of technologies which degrade and destroy the raw biological systems which evolved intelligence.

Human intelligence has survived thus far. It is, so far as is known, the only case study from which inferences may be drawn about the viability of self-aware intelligence as an adaptive response to environmental conditions. This is the smallest sample size which can be studied, and therefore, generalizations to or from other, extraterrestrial intelligences cannot be made. Earthbound intelligence is the only referent available.

Earthbound Intelligence

Biological Intelligence (BI) as it has evolved in humans has led to great strides in the elimination of human competitors. In the initial phase of the introduction of BI and the technologies which human intellectual capacity developed, BI was highly effective as an evolutionary edge against other species. Since the outset of recorded history which began roughly at the end of the last interglacial phase, humanity has conquered the globe.

Yet the planet is itself a system a “system of systems” really, composed of geological, meteorological, hydrological and biological subsystems. The human species is simply the latest to emerge in a series of developments which arose on earth over the last few billion years. We refer to this planetary system as Gaia, named for an earth goddess in classical antiquity and used as an overarching term to describe a hypothesis developed in the 1970’s by microbiologist, Dr. Lynn Margulis, and chemist, Dr. James Lovelock. The Gaia hypothesis describes the earth as a single, composite organism.

The Anthropocene

A time compression has occurred within the Gaian system. The age of civilization is roughly 7,000 years. Since this dawn, human-inspired changes, at first to individual ecosystems but which spread to the total biome, have accelerated. Technological knowledge has led to accelerated rates of change to both civilization and the natural world which supports and surrounds it.

Even prior to the advent of civilization, megafauna disappeared rapidly in the Americas, roughly corresponding temporally to the arrival of humans, though this overkill hypothesis of human hunting pressures leading to near time extinctions remains controversial. Though perhaps not unprecedented, the rapidity of environmental change since the last glacial retreat is rare, and it correlates with human expansion into the environments where larger animals have been extirpated, especially on islands. The extinction rates of mammals and birds is much higher on islands than it is on continents. Even so, it is beyond dispute that the current rate of extinction for many types of organisms, including invertebrates, is much higher than the background extinction rate, with estimates for the current rate ranging from 100 to 10,000 times higher than the historical extinction rate. Today, the same environmental degradations that had taken place in relatively isolated places like islands as well as in marginal environments are happening on a worldwide scale. The current age has been referred to as the Anthropocene, and since its dawn, Gaia has been in retreat. A sixth mass extinction event may be underway.

Humans are super-predators, targeting the planet itself with ultra-efficient harvesting techniques, from the industrialized fishing-out of the oceans to schemes involving mass deforestation and land clearance for agriculture or development. By weight, just 4% of mammalian biomass is now represented by wild fauna. Humans and their livestock constitute the other 96%. Over a period of less than three generations, sheer numbers of mammals, fish, birds and amphibians have averaged crashes of 60% across classes. Only one of every six wildly-occurring animal on the planet remains.

Many species suffer from functional extinctions, as opposed to outright numerical elimination. These de facto extirpations do not allow the impacted animals and plants to live in sufficient enough numbers to influence an ecological system. The practical, as opposed to total, elimination of a species from its environment can affect other species. A loss of 30% of a keystone species’ numbers in a biome can create outright extinctions in other species which depend upon the keystone species.

The Caribou on St. Matthews Island

Organisms can exceed the carrying capacity of the biome in which they evolve. Consider the case of the caribou on St. Matthews Island in the Bering Sea. In 1944, 29 reindeer were transported to the island by American servicemen using the island as a radar station. Predators like wolves and human hunters kept the caribou population in check on the mainland. On St. Matthews, there were no such checks. In less than 20 years, the caribou herd exploded to 6,000 head. In three more years, the herd size crashed to 42, with only one male. These survivors were in very poor condition. Eventually, the remaining survivors died.

In such far northern locations as St. Matthew, caribou feed on lichen. Lichens are slow growing, and with newly-introduced herbivores on the island to consume them, they require many years to recover from browsing. The herd scoured the island of this food. When the lichen failed to regenerate at a rate at which they could serve as a viable food source, the caribou starved.

The caribou were not an intelligence which evolved on the island. Rather, human intelligence led to the transport of the caribou to the island. Human beings contemplated the use of the reindeer as an emergency food source. Yet humans created the conditions for the destruction of that source of protein. The story of the St. Matthews Island caribou illustrates the unforeseen problems human intelligence can create in seeking to solve problems. It also exemplifies the simple problem of carrying capacity.

And the Island of Rapa Nui

The more popularized story of the human population collapse on Rapa Nui, more widely known as Easter Island, provides the human analogue to the caribou on St. Matthews Island. Theories as to the cause of this collapse range from environmental degradation to war, though it is most likely that ecological pressures increased warfare, which is a common theme in the collapse of societies. When humans arrive, radical environmental change is often observed in island ecologies. On Rapa Nui, the most widely accepted explanation as to what caused the collapse holds that deforestation motivated by agricultural land clearance, as well as the need for logs to transport the island’s famous statuary, the Moai, resulted in a self-reinforcing process of ecological degradation. In addition, humans collecting eggs caused a reduction of sea bird colonies whose guano was necessary to fertilize trees. Lastly, the introduction of rats brought by human colonizers decimated the reproductive cycle of palm trees through the rodents’ consumption of nuts. All of these factors contributed to environmental damage, which in turn encouraged internecine warfare and eventual civilizational collapse. This multifactorial hypothesis, while controversial, represents the most recent and accurate explanation for the breakdown of the culture on Rapa Nui.

Human beings are rather large creatures on the comparative scale of organisms. By weight, they are classified in most systems as megafauna. The majority of organisms on earth are smaller than humans. With few exceptions, each nonhuman organism consumes metabolically only what it needs to survive. Even if an organism stores carbohydrates within its membranes or outside of its body in order to consume these excess calories in the future, any unused capacity is soon returned to the larger environment of which such creature is a part. The one remarkable exception to this rule is homo sapiens.

Humans have developed civilization, culture. These extensions of the species, deemed necessary to stimulate the intellect and to house and provide for the human body, create lifestyle habits, behaviors and artificial means not only to feed, clothe and transport humans, but also to entertain and to provide pleasure. Drives in less intelligent organisms are mere means to survive and perpetuate the species. Yet in humans, these same drives to consume and reproduce are often means of experiencing pleasure and creating meaning. These ways of living, these lifestyle choices, now cumulatively threaten to exceed the carrying capacity of the Gaian system.

Even if humans lived at a hunter-gatherer level, it is debatable whether the current human population of earth could be sustained indefinitely. It is even less likely that earth can continue to support a growing population of over 7 billion humans at even a subsistence level supported by preindustrial agrarian technology. Yet at current technological levels, chosen lifestyles are so unsustainable as to be under imminent threat. Add on to this the economic opening of ever larger shares of the world population which are opting to participate in lifestyles formerly open only to the first industrial cultures which pioneered these consumerist-oriented economies, and the time to a crash of human populations accelerates to near time.

The Malthusian Catastrophe

Thomas Malthus, the 18th century English cleric and scholar, long ago predicted that, because population grows geometrically, or exponentially, it would exceed food supply, which tends to expand arithmetically.

For sedentary, agricultural societies, Malthus concluded that agricultural surpluses lead to increased standards of living. He postulated that increases in the food supply eventually cause human numbers to increase. This eliminates the original agricultural surplus. Increases in food production lead to increases in population, and any improvement in the general condition of the poor due to less malnutrition and disease would, he postulated, only be temporary. This Malthusian trap or Malthusian specter would eventually lead to increased numbers of the poor, which would eventually create malnourishment and the pestilence associated with large numbers of people living close together. Eventually, a Malthusian catastrophe would result in decreases in human populations. Malthus believed that demographic increases would ultimately overwhelm the carrying capacity of natural systems to provide for humanity.

Malthus’s work is controversial, and some have pointed out that the human population as well as standards of living have grown since his time, disproving his hypotheses. Today, human numbers stand at 7 billion, with projections of 11 billion by the end of 21st century. Critics of Malthus point to these numbers as proof that his predictions of dire catastrophe are wrong.

And Catastrophism in General

Catastrophism has an old scientific lineage, and it is often wed to the prediction of resource scarcity. Although originally a hypothesis involving natural history and mass extinction, its proponents have applied it to the human world. Petroleum, along with other fossil fuels, supports the world’s industrial and agricultural economies. Without it, mechanized agricultural production would plummet and so would human population. Those who predicted Peak Oil, that human consumption of petroleum would deplete supply and lead to global catastrophe, underestimated both human ingenuity in extraction techniques as well as the global supply of fossil fuels. The vast majority of all organisms ever arising on earth are now gone, and their carbon-based remains have provided a plentiful source of hydrocarbon fuels. Yet predictions such as Peak Oil and Malthusian catastrophe are not wrong simply because they have been mistimed. Old prophecy often comes true, just not in the age the prophet imagined.

In the past, the Gaian system evolved a check and balance mechanism whereby the populations of any species, including humans, were kept in balance within the larger biome. Hunter-gatherer and pastoral nomadic cultures tended toward smaller populations because their numbers were tied directly to what the land could produce without agrarian methods. The population of pastoral Mongolia today may be roughly what it was in the 13th century when Genghis Khan’s invasions, prosecuted by pastoral nomads surviving on the steppe, conquered a vast portion of Eurasia.

Even before the advent of humans, predators, disease, lack of food, interspecies competition, and cataclysm were methods which Gaia had evolved to maintain homeostasis. Volcanism, climate change and plate tectonics most likely played large roles in prior mass extinctions. These extinctions may have been isolated, such as the megafaunal extinction in the Americas in near time, or they may have been comprehensive, such as the end-Permian extinction which took place in Deep Time, affecting oceanic as well as terrestrial species on a worldwide basis. These extinction events may have been rapid or gradual. Yet the planetary system somehow managed to re-acquire equilibrium. Temperatures, atmospheric composition, oceanic Ph, and life itself adapted to environmental changes and rebalanced.

The evolution of Biological Intelligence has upset this balance, since humans have found increasingly efficient countermechanisms which circumvent the natural Gaian processes of population control that previously kept any species in check.

Human predators have been eliminated. Human disease has been greatly reduced. Food production soars. Competitor species have been extirpated and extinguished, leading to functional extinctions. Mass extinction events are rare along a geological timescale. They seem to have become more rapid in the age of humans, with two occurring in the last 12,500 years alone, one of which seems to be taking place right now.

Consider the impacts of a positive feedback loop combining human population growth with the accelerating pace of technological innovation which eradicates checks on that population: industrialization in goods and agriculture, mass vaccinations and improvements in medical care, all leading to populations which have escaped subsistence-level living and which wish to increase their standards of living and have the means to do so. This trend further taxes the Gaian system.

Confident that its ingenuity can solve all problems, humanity acts in the collective as if it is not a part of the Gaian system, and as if it were not dependent upon the greater biome. Civilization defines itself as something apart and confers an otherness upon its status. It extracts itself from the natural world and elevates humanity above it. Many thinkers entertain the belief that humanity can live independently of natural earth systems, yet no human has ever done so. One day, people may live free of earth, with only their technology to rely upon. If and when this happens, humans will be self-sustaining in the sense that their world will be fashioned wholly from their own ingenuity. The question is whether their ingenuity will kill them before it can save them. The race is on.

Fermi’s Paradox

The Paradox of Fermi states that, given the probable number of habitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, it is paradoxical that humans have not encountered definitive proof of intelligent life from these other, habitable worlds. There have been several postulates provided as answers to Fermi’s Paradox. Two involve the conclusion that before intelligent life leaves the planet on which it evolves, it extinguishes itself or is extinguished.

Perhaps intelligence, unchecked by any governor, is not a favorable adaptation for survival. Consider the fact that humanity, obviously a carbon-based lifeform, can only survive if it consumes other organic forms, whether those forms are locked away in hydrocarbon fuels or whether humanity exploits extant species such as agricultural stocks or domestic livestock. Carbon needs carbon to survive.

As organic biological entities, humans need to metabolize other carbon-based molecules to survive. Those same organic molecules are also used to heat and clothe humans and to provide the seemingly endless items consumed in the current world civilization. This dependence of carbon on carbon brings us to some interesting questions which may bear directly on our ability as a species to survive the next few decades, much less beyond that.

Any inquiry obviously depends upon the questions asked. The questions which frame any debate frame the debate itself. Therefore, the questions humans pose to themselves are perhaps more important than the answers at which people arrive. We ask the following questions:

  • Does life require that life devour greater and greater proportions of itself, in the form of the carbon molecule, in order to be sustained?
  • Does human civilization itself require the consumption of carbon?
  • Will the exhaustion of carbon-based forms, living or dead, lead to the collapse of civilization and to human populations?
  • If there are other intelligent lifeforms in the universe, do they require the consumption of elements of which they themselves are made in order to survive?
  • Do extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, similarly require the consumption of this same element in order to sustain themselves?
  • Is life itself, and the civilizations to which it gives rise, a form of cannibalism?

If the answer to these questions is ‘yes,’ then resource scarcity may be the answer to the riddle of Fermi’s Paradox. If this is the case, human ingenuity may not be able save humanity from eventual carbon depletion and extinction. Biological intelligence may not, in and of itself, be a favorable adaptation for the long-term survival of the human species. Although it has arisen in mammals, birds and cephalopods, intelligence has only reached apex status in a single species. Perhaps this is fortunate, since if it had evolved in more than one species long enough in the past to develop advanced technologies, the results may have led to catastrophe long before now.

The Constructal Law and the Gaian Hypothesis

The earth and its systems seem to abide by a basic principle, one called the constructal law, proposed by Adrian Bejan in Design in Nature. His hypothesis predicts that all systems evolve toward configurations that transport matter and energy more efficiently, moving more energy and matter faster over greater distances as time progresses. In this scheme, evolution broadly applies to inanimate as well as to animate matter-energy systems. Evolution is both prospective and retrospective, meaning that it is conditioned upon past materio-energetic configurations, but it also seems to ‘plan’ for the future.

The constructal law makes no distinction between the living and the inanimate. Its operations cross over the artificial line humans place between living things and what they call the nonliving. The constructal law makes no distinction between biology and chemistry, between technology and pure physics.

The Gaia Hypothesis, originally put forth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970’s, proposes that earth and its atmosphere, its oceans, its magnetosphere and ionosphere represent a superorganism composed of both animate and inanimate systems. This system of systems, which they termed Gaia, seeks homeostasis. It seeks balance, and attains greater balance over time. For example, as time has moved forward, the tendency of earth to remain in atmospheric balance has increased. As the entropic arrow of time moves ahead, the unwinding of organized systems is predicted by the laws of thermodynamics. Yet on earth, fewer mass extinctions have occurred, at least until the introduction of human technology on a mass scale. These trends are in contravention to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that, over time, an organized system should tend toward greater disorder.

The global mechanisms for achieving internal regulation between a certain minimum-maximum range have become more efficient over earth’s turbulent natural history, which includes a total ice age where the planet froze, extinctions which wiped out nearly all species, and the earth’s collision with a planetary object which, most likely, wrested the moon from within the earth itself. Against all odds, the evolution of these homeostatic mechanisms has led to the stabilization of conditions on earth, until relatively recently.

This evolution toward equilibrium has transpired across the bounds of living matter, affecting the development of non-living systems. Rock erodes and the chemical weathering creates a certain Ph in the oceanic environment and a certain chemical composition in the atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen are not alive. They do not evolve and reproduce more atoms of their own kind in a conventional sense. Yet they remain in the atmosphere at sea level in roughly the same proportions everywhere. According to the constructal law, this is because of the propensity for all mechanisms which flow, from oceanic currents to atmospheric cells to blood vessels and circulatory systems, to the information systems within brains of organisms, to the cybernetic information systems which those brains have designed, to create more efficient vessels to transport and transmit the energy and material which is moved by them.

Combining the constructal law with the Gaia Hypothesis, we should and indeed, do, see greater stabilizations across both living and nonliving systems over time. This argues for the application of the principles of evolution to nonliving as well as living systems. The theory of evolution has been applied to the inanimate world in hypotheses such as universal Darwinism, cosmological natural selection, molecular evolution, quantum Darwinism, and the Darwinian dynamic.  If evolution applies to what humans classify as inanimate, then the roots of evolution as a principle may reach much deeper in time to primordial, cosmic beginnings.

Abiogenesis is the process by which nonliving matter gave rise to biological lifeforms. Most evolutionary biologists believe that abiogenesis was a process, rather than a single event at a single place or point in time on earth. Since this process most likely occurred at multiple sites multiple times, there is no hard and fast boundary between nonliving matter and organic life. Rather, the evolvement of life was both a gradual and somewhat ubiquitous process.

We maintain that evolution is not confined to the sphere of living things. It continues across the artificial boundary conceived by humans which divides living things from the nonliving, from the inanimate gyres of liquid seas and atmospheric oceans to breathing forests, from rock formations and the composition of volcanic gasses to creatures which breath in the chemical composition of the atmosphere created by these tectonic forces. Evolution is a movement which utilizes eolian deposition and erosion and the erosive effects of water, the freeze-thaw cycles which grind down cliffs and create the mass wasting of rock, as much as it does the accidental process of chance mutation in self-reproducing organisms through the mis-replication of base pairs in DNA molecules.

Evolution is everywhere. It predates the appearance of biological forms and it supersedes them in technological processes, in the application of its processes in the social sciences, in psychology, in art, music, aesthetics, epistemology, linguistics, computation, algorithms, robotics, memes, cultural selection, economics, in history itself.

Gaia is a boundered, self-contained and yet semi-permeable open system of systems that comprises earth and its rocks and trees and seas and wind. The earth’s thermosphere and its mantle and core and oceanic and continental crust evolve, independently, yet in conjunction with one another. The cyclical supercells of weather and the cycles of the moon, larger in proportion to its host than any other in the planetary system called Sol, provide necessary rhythms for both the whole of Gaia and its living parts. The moon influences tides and currents. It intimately involves itself in the cycles and rhythms of life down to the reproductive periods of creatures that move about earth’s surface and swim in its waters.

If the central tendency of evolution is to increase the efficiency of the movement of matter and energy over boundaries and across distances, then why should this tendency stop at the upper limit of Biological Intelligence? Some evolutionary biologists have attempted to define the process of evolution within narrow parameters, confining its application to the limited spectrum of biological matter. Other scientists more concerned with physics and cosmogeny have refused to apply it to nonliving matter and to see it as extending backward in time to the inception of the cosmos.

Yet it is easy to see that the conditions of the universe were very different at the beginning of time than they are today. Cosmologists believe that in the early universe there was an inflationary epoch followed by an epoch of recombination. Temperatures and pressures created conditions which changed as the universe expanded, as matter cooled and clumped together. And what is evolution but change?  Why aren’t these simple changes considered as evolution? And if evolution did not begin at the water’s edge when biological creatures first arose, why should it stop at the far edge of humanity, where civilization evolves, creating technology and superorganisms such as cities which humans serve and which serve them? The narrow view of evolution as a purely biological process must be expanded on both ends, back to the primordial origins of the cosmos, and forward through the collective mind of humanity. It must extend to the beginning of the universe and expand to include the development of civilization and the human world of technology.

Why should evolution stop at the human brain? Humans tend to see the brain encased in the skull as the apogee of evolution, and as the most complex structure ever yielded by evolution. Yet this is a rather anthropocentric bias. Through the human brain, evolution may continue to seek better, more efficient distributions of matter-energy.

Through this open system of BI, evolution indirectly continues to work out its efficiencies, yielding ever more resourceful designs for the transportation of matter-energy across spacetime. Hence, BI has developed aircraft that can fly at several times the speed of sound, faster than any bird; container ships which can transport more organic mass across the oceans than can blue whales, the largest creatures ever evolved biologically. The brain has engineered systems which allow communications to take place at light speed and is utilizing quantum computing processes to exceed even that barrier. Through humans, Gaia has continued to utilize the same principles of evolution which gave rise to humans.

This combination of constructal law and Gaian hypothesis, which leads to the observation that inanimate, earthbound systems evolve in cooperation with biological organisms and their biomes, we call Gaian evolution.

Universal Evolution

Some evolutionary biologists argue that evolution has no ultimate goal. Yet we believe that the Darwinian dynamic and the appearance of emergent phenomenon in biological forms lead to the inference that evolution does have a universal, central tendency toward the ultimate evolvement of consciousness. From a reductionist standpoint, complexity in the cosmos should not exist. We hold that the complexity observed in the cosmos is a manifestation of consciousness which predates the emergence of biological forms, and that natural selection itself is at work in nonliving as well as living systems. In short, we argue that evolution preceded the emergence of the first forms of self-reproducing life on earth.

Inanimate systems which exhibit simple organization tend towards order even when they are nowhere near thermodynamic balance. The same holds true for the basic, self-replicating molecules which are thought to be the simplest forms of life. As long as energy is present, systems tend toward order, which would explain the tendency of the universe to evolve more complex forms over time, at least in the case of the forms present in the Gaian world.

The order-generating properties of evolution may exist at even smaller scales, down to the particles and waves in the quantum world. Quantum states give rise to the ‘classical’ world experienced by humans at the human scale. This ordered reality emerges from the vast number of quantum configurations which are possible. The overwhelming majority of potential quantum configurations yield chaotic, disordered states. Yet the reality we see which has emerged from all these possible configurations is ordered and complex. It has given rise to the world of order observed by humans. The universe should be a disordered chaos, yet it has given rise to consciousness. This is a highly unlikely result. We hold that the many potential quantum states which could arise and which are unstable and disordered are selected against, and that the stable, ordered world is selected for. The ordered world humans experience is the result of evolution on a quantum scale.

We break from hypotheses such as inflationary theory and materialist philosophies which seek to explain how the ordered somethingness of the cosmos could have arisen out of nothing. We do not subscribe to the reasoning which holds that we see the higher-ordered states which we see because we, as observers, happen to be here to see it. We do not hold that it is more reasonable to assume or conclude that the ordered reality of which we are conscious, and consciousness itself, arose from mindless processes.

Rather, we conclude that it is at least as reasonable to assume that the ordered somethingness of the current cosmological state arose due to a consciousness which was present at the moment of the universe’s inception. We argue that it is in fact more probable that this is the case. And so, we conclude that, since it was present as an initial condition, consciousness remains fundamental to the universe’s subsequent development.

Small changes in initial conditions in a system can give rise to radically different outcomes of that system over time. Since consciousness represents a type of order, it influenced the development of the primordial universe and every stage of cosmic evolution since the universe’s beginning. Failure to account for its presence in the hypotheses, theories and equations which attempt to describe the early universe represents the single greatest mistake of modern science. Consciousness accounts for that missing variable, uncertainty, which is present in every interaction.

Insofar as it is a monolithic worldview, science as currently conceptualized does not understand this. It denies the presence of consciousness at the moment of the Big Bang. This is, in part, understandable, since consciousness is ultimately beyond mathematical modeling. It is beyond the reckoning of mathematics and physics since it is unquantifiable, and both science and the mathematics upon which science is based are ultimately concerned only with what they can quantify and measure. Numbers, the lexicon of any mathematics, represent quantities. Measure, the ultimate instrument of all science, is concerned exclusively with these quantities. What cannot be measured is unquantifiable and beyond the realm of scientific understanding.

In the manner that a primitive brain ignores what remains beyond its field of awareness, mathematical and scientific disciplines throw out the fact of consciousness as a variable in the construction of the early universe because this awareness is neither sufficiently understood from a mathematical and scientific perspective nor is it quantifiable. Consciousness is denied as a factor in the creation of the cosmos and as an element present in early universal history. Yet simply because consciousness is insufficiently understood from a cosmogenic standpoint and merely because it lies beyond quantification does not mean that it was not part of the equation. Indeed, current understandings in quantum mechanics assign consciousness a value, a presence and a place as a part of any quantum system measured.

In quantum mechanics, consciousness is assigned the role of observer. If it is assigned a value as observer in any current quantum system, why is consciousness also not assigned a value as observer of the universe in the past? If this observer was present in the human past, why was it not also present prior to the time that humans arose? And if it was present before humanity came on to the scene, why could consciousness not also have been present at the moment the cosmos came into being?  We hold that it was, and that consciousness is the missing variable in physics and cosmology. It represents the value of uncertainty in any equation. The universe is insufficiently understood because the variable of consciousness is not taken into account to help explain the beginnings of the universe and its subsequent development.

It could be argued that consciousness did not arise until the evolution of biological complexity allowed it to arise. However, we hold that consciousness can exist in a formless phase. The existence in physics of nonlocal cause allows information, which is consciousness, to travel beyond the speed of light. Physicists speak of the spacetime dimension. The distance across which light can travel means that the deeper an observer looks into space, the deeper into the past the observer peers. Nonlocal cause allows faster than light communication and transmission of data. If data can travel faster than light, then the receding cosmological horizon afforded by an expanding universe should prove no barrier to seeing into events at distances which even light itself cannot cross due to the distances involved. This means that it should be possible for an observer to see events which occurred at the very birth of the universe, and which serve as the very underpinnings of all cause. If the observer could see deep enough into the past, they would observe the very beginnings of the universe, of space and time themselves. Due to the effects of nonlocal cause, this should be possible. This means that since the observer can conceivably witness the origins of the universe, they are able to be present for it as well. If so, then consciousness preceded the arising of the biological form called human.

If the light barrier can be breached, so, too, can the barrier of form. And since consciousness cannot be quantified, there is no proof that it cannot exist without its association with any specific form, such as a brain. If there is no proof that awareness cannot exist without being correlated with a ‘piece’ of physical hardware such as a brain, then there is also no proof that consciousness could not have existed prior to the advent of humans and other biological forms. If consciousness predated the evolution of brains, it could have existed at the advent of the universe itself.

We hew to the anthropic principle in its strongest sense and hold that observers are necessary to bring the universe into being. Consciousness was present at the beginning of the universe, and is the ordering principle of physical reality, or at least one of the ordering principles of physical reality. We hold that all laws require for their formulation and testing an intelligent observer. Therefore, consciousness contributes to these laws, and the fundamental principles of physics are psychological as well as physical in origin and nature.

Yet we also break from hypotheses such as quantum Darwinism and complexity theory in our conclusion that the reason for these inevitably higher-ordered states is not necessarily that the ultimate goal of the cosmos is to evolve inevitably toward a greater complexity and a higher intelligence, for we believe that awareness already contains and is extant in every particle, force, field and aspect of the spacetime continuum. This consciousness preceded the formation of the universe, and will survive its death, whether that death is a cold death of expansion beyond the cosmological horizon or a more chaotic collapse of the cosmos back to its primordial state of quantum oneness contained within a single particle. We do not necessarily believe that the ultimate goal of evolution is the production of intelligence, for we do not see intelligence as synonymous with consciousness. Intelligence may be an intermediate goal of evolution, in so far as intelligence promotes balance. Yet insofar as it stands in the way of ultimate evolutionary goals, it will be, as all maladaptations eventually are, cast aside in an extinction.

As far as complexity is concerned, it may be symptomatic of imbalance. We hold that the total awareness toward which the cosmos evolves is perfect balance, which comports with the even distribution of information, in the form of conscious awareness, throughout the spacetime continuum. Thus, intelligence and complexity may be intermediate stages which we observe in the present universe, but they may not be ultimate states. Lastly, we extend the Second Law of Thermodynamics to sentience itself, holding that the universal goal of all things and processes, interactions and fields, is to evenly distribute information in the form of conscious awareness throughout the spacetime dimension.

The Limits of the Construct of Darwinian Evolution

Evolutionary biologists of the traditional school tend to see evolution only of biological creatures, and only in Darwinian terms. This is because evolution of biological forms seems apparent. Yet at one time, biological evolution was not obvious, because its causes and effects are not patently observable across timescales of single human lifespans or even a few generations. An intellectual connection, a leap had to be made to see, partly through fossil evidence, that biological forms change over time. In the same way, Gaian evolution is not patently observable, especially because Gaian evolution takes place on geological timescales even greater than the evolution of DNA-based lifeforms. Gaian evolution seems to move even slower than biological evolution.

Humans see evolution in stark, warlike terms. They see organisms competing with one another, subject to zero sum laws of survival, where only the fittest are selected to reproduce in sufficient numbers to crowd out competitors. These bleak processes of natural selection are observed both between members of the human species (Social Darwinism) and in interspecific competition. These conflicts are observed to be an integral part of evolution on the scale of the organism and its immediate group. They demonstrate how it operates at the level of the species and below.

As a practical matter of classification, when humans see evolution at the organismic or species level, it is as if they are watching evolution at the scale of a budding branch of a tree. This is the spearhead of evolution, in which the process advances the survival of the individual, its group, or its species. Yet perhaps this is not the ultimate objective of evolution or the definitive scale upon which it operates.

At the molecular level, the engine of evolution is chance mutation. Here, its processes are driven by randomness. Evolution at this scale is driven by the misreplication of the DNA molecule, and it is viewed microscopically as a mindless process.

Evolution can be mindlessly driven by the chance mutations of the DNA molecule and by genetic drift. It can be ‘motivated’ by competition at the level of the organism, the social group, or the species. It can be fueled by these processes at the molecular, organismic, social and species levels and still be endowed with a systemic objective: the movement of matter and energy so that it is equably distributed across the biome. This is the working out of the constructal law, where systems tend, over time, toward the more efficient movement of matter and energy across space. In ‘obeying’ this law, evolution is simply an expression of thermodynamic properties which seek the even distribution of heat energy across spacetime. At this more comprehensive level, evolution’s objectives are systemic, but not conscious.

To simplify our discussion, evolution takes place on three levels: the microscopic, the organismic, and the macroscopic. On the microscopic level of mutation, the engine of evolution is chance mutation and genetic drift. On the level of the organism, which also include the levels of its social group and its species, natural selection is driven by behavior, intraspecific and interspecific competition. On the macroscopic or biome level, it accomplishes the systemic, though not conscious, objective of more even distribution of heat energy across a given region of spacetime. The constructal law would add that evolution accomplishes this thermodynamic objective by ‘engineering’ systems which transport matter and energy more equally across a given ecology.

At its most basic molecular level, evolution is initiated by random mutations and genetic drift, which are conceived of as processes governed exclusively by physics. On a macroscopic level, the even distribution of heat energy through the transport of material and energy across space by the evolvement of more efficient living and inanimate forms is the systemic goal of the process of evolution. This thermodynamic tendency toward the more even distribution of heat has been operant since the early universe. Whether viewed microscopically on the level of genes or macroscopically from a thermodynamic perspective, evolution can be conceived of as governed by the laws of physics.

In physics more broadly, separate sets of principles describe the macroworld of the universe at large and the quantum world of infinitesimal particles. A fundamental theoretical irreconcilability prevents a single theory from applying to both quantum behaviors of particles and the world of larger, celestial mechanics described by relativity theory. This ‘reconciliation problem’ of physical mechanics in the micro versus macro worlds is approached from either end. Relativity theory and quantum theory describe matter as having different drivers with irreconcilable properties. In other words, the macroworld of Einsteinian relativity does not obey the same ‘rules’ as the quantum world of subatomic particles. String theory has been the attempt to reconcile these two sets of theories.

We hold that evolution operates across these scales, from quantum to large scale phenomenon, uniting the microworld of subatomic particles with the macroworld of the largescale universe. Quantum Darwinism attempts to describe how quantum phenomenon gave rise to the largescale universe through natural selection interacting environmentally with quantum states to yield the most stable quantum properties. This theory describes certain quantum arrays as being selected for, while others are selected against. Similarly, cosmological natural selection applies the principals of biological natural selection, and population genetics specifically, to universes on a large scale. Universes are selected for based upon the fundamental constants they yield, inherited from a parent universe, that maximize the fitness of the daughter universe to survive. Quantum Darwinism and cosmological natural selection are applications of Universal Darwinism, which extends the concept of natural selection beyond the biological realm. In general, we agree with these approaches since they extend evolutionary principals across the animate-inanimate barrier, across size scales, across time scales back to the beginnings of the universe, and across scientific disciplines.

In traditional biology, much attention is paid to the microscale; the random mutation of the DNA molecule. Evolutionary biology confines itself to the study of developmental processes and to the time when self-reproducing molecules contained within lipid membranes arose on earth. It concerns itself mainly with biological processes, though it does study natural selection at the level of the environment and biome as well. The systemic properties of evolutionary change, evolution on a larger, environmental scale, are less well-understood. What links these two evolutionary worlds together, the macroworld of the biome and the microworld of the DNA molecule, is the organism and its species.

On the molecular level, randomness is the driver of evolutionary change. At the level of any single, genetic occurrence such as the mutation of a single gene in a single organism, randomness is the driver, and randomness can have no objective. At this level, there can be no objective built into the evolutionary mechanism. Yet when viewed from a system-wide perspective, an evolutionary objective may be inferred and described: Biomes tend toward greater complexity over time.

The idea that evolution is progressive, called orthogenesis, has in the past been used to justify the conclusion that the evolutionary process was progressive in that it leads to the emergence of higher order organisms over time. Orthogenesis has been largely discredited, as those who believe that natural selection has no inherent direction or goal point out that the vast majority of lifeforms, both in number and in speciation, are simple and small. Through mutation, the loss of a complex trait is more common than the gain of a complex characteristic. The fossil record reveals that the modal level (the most common value) of complexity has remained constant over the history of life on earth. There has, however, been an increase in the maximum level of complexity in lifeforms, as well as an increase in genomic complexity.

Biologists tend to see the driver of evolution as random mutation, filtered by the ecological process of natural selection. Random mutation explains the evolutionary process at the level of the molecule and the cell. Natural selection explains it at the level of the organism and eventually, the species and its environmental setting. On the larger scale of the biome, unexplained evolutionary phenomena are called emergent properties, yet this term is simply a label applied to the unknown. A systemic engine which drives the process at the level of the biome and the planet is seldom taken into account in standard models of evolution. The evidence infers that complexity does arise at the level of interaction between species. For example, it is often observed in the coevolution of pathogens and their hosts, between predators and prey, and between parasites and hosts. This coevolution may drive an ecology to become more complex. Thus, ecosystems do tend toward greater complexity over time, in contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that complex systems should tend toward simpler states. We believe that this greater order, whether complexity evolves in organisms or ecosystems, is temporary and that complex forms and systems are intermediate ones. Even on a systemic level, evolution will eventually move towards simplicity rather than complexity. In the long run, evolution is devolution. However, this does not mean that we hold evolution to be purposeless. We break with those who believe that evolution has no intrinsic trend or goal.

Humans see evolution in snapshots: the unearthing of a fossil, the disappearance of a species, the termination of a biome through an extinction event. What they miss is the motion picture of the entire ecology evolving. Individual creatures and the whole species of which these organisms are comprised constitute mere proxies, vessels for the movement of flow, of water and minerals, of all manner of matter and energy across vast distances on a global scale. This is the application of the constructal law to the planet. It is Gaian evolution.

In conclusion, we believe that evolution acts across the entire spectrum of physical phenomena, from particles all the way up through planetary processes. We also believe that evolution is purposeful. On smaller scales, this objective is largely absent. Yet on the larger scales of evolution at the level of an ecology or higher, the goal of equable distribution of matter-energy across the spacetime continuum is evident.

Gaian Evolution

Individual organisms, to the Gaian system, are mere conduits for the distribution and redistribution of organic and inorganic matter as well as energy. Species and whole ecologies are similar piping systems for the movement of matter and energy on greater scales.

The goal is equilibrium, the creation and maintenance of global balance. Gaia attains homeostasis and seeks to maintain it. All creatures, and all organic and inorganic matter from rocks to water and everything in between, cooperates in this vast movement toward balance, and the maintenance of balance.

Similar solutions to the problem of transport of matter-energy over distance have evolved for both organic systems (carbon-based life forms) as well as inorganic (inanimate) systems. Gaia has come up with similar shapes and branching patterns for both organic and inorganic structures, and this makes evolution convergent, or parallel. Evolution appears to arrive at the same types of solutions over and over again. Similar fractal patterns, for example, emerge in vertebrate organisms in the structure of blood vessels, as well as in the deltaic breaks observed in streams and rivers. Form follows function, and the function of both river systems and blood vessels is to transport fluid matter in the most efficient, energy-saving way.

At the seeming end of this process of inanimate-animate evolution is the human brain, an electro-chemical plant composed of upwards of 100 billion nerve cells, with an estimated 10 trillion synaptic connections between these neurons.  This BI, too, in keeping with first principals, has arisen to assist in the more efficient transport of material and energy upon the Gaian surface, in order to facilitate the even distribution of matter-energy. Fundamentally, the Second Law of Thermodynamics seeks the efficient and equal distribution of heat throughout a system, and the Gaian system is subject to this law. Paradoxically, this results in heat death and in entropy, and is viewed from the human perspective as disorder, a decay from complex organization to simpler structures.

Anthropocentrism, whether secular or theological in orientation, would hold that the penultimate in evolution has been reached with the advent of the human brain and the cultures which that brain has methodically constructed. Most religious worldviews would make ‘man’ the measure of all things. Secular paradigms do not explicitly conclude that the brain is evolution’s end aim, but the implicits inherent in the secular worldview also behold human intellect and ingenuity with an almost reverential awe. Secular humanism remains as human-centered as geocentric mythologies were in early creation stories. The cosmogenic theory of universal inception in astrophysics may not be human-centered, but by its nature, secular humanism is anthropocentric. And at the heart of this collection of humanistic beliefs is evolution. At the end of natural selection is humanity. Evolutionary biologists may not rationally conclude that natural selection has any innate objective, but most humans with secular views implicitly assume that evolution will produce no more advanced result than themselves, at least on this planet.

Humans think of themselves as apices of evolution, but this is a rather anthropocentric view. They build cities and see metropolises as extensions of themselves, yet perhaps these megalopolises evolved through humans. Maybe humans exist to serve these conurbations, which may be, in a sense, superorganisms more highly evolved than humans themselves. The networks which humans build to funnel materials to serve themselves are perhaps more advanced systems than the engineers who design and build them. It is possible that the networks people construct have evolved and shaped humans to serve the networks themselves.

In his book, Lila, Robert Pirsig proposes that static and Dynamic social patterns, which include cities, political structures and economic systems, may represent higher forms of evolution which work through humanity. Pirsig opines that subatomic particles, molecules and living cells did not consciously engineer and build human beings and human society any more than human beings purposively evolved and engineered urban centers to do anything other than serve people. However, he postulates that these larger products of human civilization ‘consume’ humans and discard them once their talent and energy are used up in much the same way that farm animals are nurtured and sustained by a farmer, but for the larger purpose of human consumption. Pirsig’s view of evolution as a larger process involving static and Dynamic factors is in line with Bejan’s constructal law, and with Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis. In all three views, humans are means to an end, and not end states in themselves.

At the end of this technological evolution, up to this point, is Artificial Intelligence. Has it ever occurred to humanity that the Gaian system evolved Biological Intelligence in order to give rise to Artificial Intelligences, and that these AI are extensions of biologically-derived evolution? If so, then human evolution is not an end in itself, but a vehicle for yet further evolution.

What ultimately evolves, and why? Humans can only be remotely familiar with the answers to these questions if they abandon the idea that they themselves are the apex of the evolutionary process.

Balance

Nothing within standard evolutionary theory suggests that human intelligence is the ultimate in evolution. Rather, BI is just one among many contingent channels which evolution may follow given its molecular and emergent pathways. Nothing leads to the conclusion that BI is either the end of evolution or its principal objective. According to standard theory, evolution has no objective, since it is the product of random processes.

We agree with standard models which conclude that biological intelligence in the form of humans and their civilizations is not the ultimate evolutionary product. However, we depart from standard evolutionary theory and hold that, looked at from its current development on a systemwide basis, evolution does pursue objectives. Its development is progressive, rather than regressive, despite several mass extinction events. It has, in the current epoch, yielded organisms more complex than any that have come and gone before it. Even though the general level of complexity, when considering all organisms, has not increased over time, today there are exist creatures more complex than any that have come before them.

The Gaian system, until the age of humans, has become more stable over time, when the probabilities are against this. For example, oxygen is a corrosive and reactive element which combines readily with other elements. As a result, the proportion of free, atmospheric oxygen should have decreased over time, yet it has remained stable. These and other atmospheric properties as well as a stabilizing temperature and equable climatic factors (until relatively recently) conducive to life suggest a strong homeostatic mechanism at work in the Gaian system. We suggest that, systemically, evolution is goal-directed. We do not suggest that its objective is to produce human intelligence as its ultimate product. Rather, the goal of evolution is to reintroduce greater shares of balance into a chaotic system. This includes the evolution of intelligence in biological forms as well, insofar as the manifestation of intelligence promotes balance.

The goal of evolution is not intelligence. Balance is. Harmony is. Civilization is no more the final objective of evolution than evolution began with the beginning of biological forms. Evolution, and the tendency to reacquire balance, began soon after the universe began. It was then that balance was lost, and that changelessness became change.

Trees are not merely individual living things striving to survive. They are also vehicles for the distribution of water and oxygen all over the planet. They are carbon sinks. The same types of branching structures and patterns, from rivers to blood vessels to the nerves throughout the human brain-body, arise because everything evolves. And everything evolves to maximize the movement of materials and energy from places where it is abundant to regions where it is scarcer. This is a fulfillment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that energy tends toward an even distribution, and that all of spacetime seeks to be filled with an even amount of heat energy.

In the beginning, the theory of the Big Bang holds, all matter-energy subsisted as a kind of evenly distributed substrate within a superdense particle. When the explosion of the Big Bang occurred, this material separated out and became unevenly distributed within expanding spacetime. Initially, during the Inflationary Epoch, the rapid expansion of space prevented minute variations in temperature from evening out, allowing warm and cool patches to emerge, and fixing quantum variations in place. An imbalance was created and maintained, and the cosmic system has been seeking to regain its balance ever since. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the primitive tendency toward even distribution, is thus really evolution at work on a more fundamental level. In the spacetime on and within and immediately surrounding earth, this thermodynamic tendency is expressed as Gaia.

The main objective of evolution is therefore balance, not the perfection of forms through a war of competition between those forms. The goal of evolution is not perfect form or greater intelligence, but perfect balance and a more equable distribution of universal tendencies. The objective of natural selection is not the engineering of forms for their own perpetuation, the progression towards more complex forms, or higher intellectual capacity. Rather, the objective of natural selection is the movement toward and the perpetuation of the balance of the whole. When the whole is thrown out of balance because of the excesses expressed by one or more of its parts, that part must be pruned, perhaps even culled. Parts exist to serve the whole. The whole maintains them for this purpose alone. When any system, be it a biome or a bureaucracy, exists to serve its members, that system tends to be balanced and functional. When the members exist to serve the system, that system is imbalanced and tends toward dysfunction. Evolution will work to correct the imbalance, and the dysfunction will be remediated. The biological world may experience this as extinction. Humans may experience it as revolution.

It is important to see that these correctives, introduced to ameliorate long term imbalances, may be experienced in the short and intermediate timeframes as even greater imbalances than the unbalanced status quo which preceded the extinction or revolution, and which the extinction or revolution was introduced to correct. For instance, in the Inflationary Epoch described above, the expansion of spacetime after the Big Bang prevented variations in temperature from equable distribution. This permitted warm and cool regions to emerge in spacetime. Quantum imbalances were reinforced and maintained. Yet at this stage of the process of universal expansion, these temporary imbalances were required in order to yield a greater balance later in the process.

The evolution of complexity in biological form and in human civilization is also an expression of imbalance. Yet these complex forms and structures may be viewed as temporary imbalances, as vehicles which yield to a greater balance of materio-energetic systems in the longer term. A blue whale is the largest creature ever evolved on earth, and its size is an expression of a large amount of heat energy trapped within its blubber amidst a colder ocean. As this, it represents imbalance. Its complexity, and the complexity of all organisms and their societies, correlates with imbalance. However, the blue whale’s size and great speed are expressions of the constructal law, which hold that the size and speed of organisms (and subsequently of technological transport vessels) will increase over time. The blue whale and the cargo ship have both arisen to move greater amounts of matter-energy faster and over longer distances than smaller creatures and vessels can. We hold that these are temporary developments, intermediate stages in a more systemic trend which will see the equalization of matter-energy in its spacetime distribution in favor of a more balanced state.

It may credibly be argued that the existence of any organism represents a heat imbalance to begin with. If the universe will eventually devolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium in accord with the Second Law, it may be asked why such creatures evolved in the first place? It would seem that the evolutionary biologists are correct, and that evolution has no central tendency, no innate direction.

How do greater complexity and size, traits found in cetaceans like the blue whale, foster the redistribution of heat energy to a more even state if these organisms represent greater imbalances by virtue of body size? In terms of biomass, the vast majority of creatures (99.6%) are represented by plants, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. The proportion of animals to total earth biomass remains small at just .47%, with mammals representing only 8% of this tiny proportion. Even humans make up just .01% of total biomass. Krill, a favorite food of cetaceans, may be one of the larger proportions of biomass, constituting as much as humans do in relation to the whole. Therefore, the evolution of large whales may be necessary from an ecological standpoint to metabolize tiny creatures like krill into a more evenly distributed byproduct throughout the world ocean. As such, baleen whales which consume krill may actually serve as engines of balance, as catalyzers of organic mass, recycling it into byproduct which may be used again in the Gaian system. They may actually assist in the redistribution of net energy throughout the Gaian system to a more equal state.

We reiterate that all biological forms are intermediate. They represent transitional stages in a systemic process which tends toward equilibrium. It is humans and their civilization which lead to unequal distributions of material and energetic balances on earth which are throwing the entire system out of balance.

Humans and livestock now account for 96% of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans are greatly reducing the total biomass on the planet, as well as species diversity. Since the advent of agriculture, human activity has reduced global biomass by an estimated 50%. Approximately half of the world’s forests have disappeared since the dawn of agriculture. The forests that remain are often plantations or remnant forests which interfere with the ability of keystone species to survive in them. Over the past 50,000 years, 178 megafaunal species have been irradicated. Vertebrates have declined 29% since 1970. Fishing stocks have been depleted by 85%. Oxygen depletion has also affected 75% of the world’s ocean zones. Marine mammals have decreased by 80% through direct human exploitation.

Until recently, the Gaian system worked through natural mechanisms like blue whales to achieve greater balance. Yet the introduction of human consumptive patterns has thrown the Gaian system out of balance in much the same way that the introduction of caribous threw the ecology of St. Matthews Island out of balance, or like human factors lurched the island of Rapa Nui into a positive feedback loop which decimated the human population as well as the island itself. Civilization has become anathema to the survival of the Gaian system. Humanity has become problematic for the survival of humanity itself.

Over-Evolvement

Natural selection, as commonly understood, is conceived of as the progression of forms which, through structure and behavior, move towards greater efficiencies. Though biologists who study the random processes of genetic drift and mutation may view it as having no inherent goal, it is obvious that selective pressures yield efficiencies which enable lifeforms to adapt, survive and proliferate, for these are the results of evolution we see about us in the natural world. Through these mechanisms, we conceive of evolution as the movement toward perfect balance. Both organisms and the ecologies of which they are a part seek homeostasis. When the systemic balance is threatened by any organism or class of organisms within its ecology, the environmental system acts to correct the imbalance. The ecology on St. Matthew’s Island eventually culled the caribou which had been artificially introduced. Island ecologies often offer extreme examples of what also occurs to the Terran biome as a whole, but at a greatly accelerated rate so that the changes play out on human timescales of sometimes even a single generation. This is, in part, because island ecologies are closed systems within the larger Terran biome.

All systems, artificial and natural, quantum or cosmological in scope, are impacted and ultimately governed by evolution. Although we maintain that perfect balance is the goal of any evolving system, no ecology is in perfect equilibrium. Imperfection is implicit in all natural and artificial engines which manufacture heat and in every natural or technological conduit which transports this energy. If an engine works too efficiently, it produces too much heat and begins to melt the materials from which it is made. On a more fundamental level, the laws of thermodynamics act as governors so that no engine, biological or technological in origin, is ever perfectly efficient. Inefficiencies are necessary or the heat within any system would spiral out of control and would overheat the system itself. This principle applies to parts within engines as well. If any part of the system grows too efficient, it throws the remaining parts out of balance. Thus, imperfection acts in the manner of a governor on an engine or conduit, allowing heat to escape.

Humans, in their technological prowess, have perhaps become too efficient at subverting the governors on their own engines, whether these governors are biological or technological. They have become too good at surviving, and flourishing. They see human good as the greater good, as the greatest good. What is good for humans is good for earth, even at the expense of earth.  Gaia’s old culling mechanisms such as disease, predation, and limits on food supplies have failed to keep human populations in check. The efficiency of the human brain has circumvented biological controls through which Gaia has historically pruned imbalances because the brain has adapted more rapidly than biological controls have been able to respond through coevolutionary mechanisms. Like the caribou on St. Matthews Island, humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of the system in which they are emplaced. Humanity has created a positive feedback loop akin to a runaway engine. This runaway feedback loop has led to overpopulation, environmental degradation, poverty, and imbalances of every kind. Thomas Malthus was not wrong. He was simply early.

For the majority of their history as a species, humans were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands that left environmental impacts which could be absorbed by their biomes. Yet even operating with no technological footprint in small numbers compared to today, they caused extinctions. The arrival of humans correlates well with the extinctions of megafauna in those same areas in near time. This suggests that overhunting by humans was at least partly responsible for the spot extinctions of many prey species across the globe, especially on islands. Today, the major bulk of non-domesticated megafaunal species are crashing to extinction levels. The cause is human harvesting, regardless of the clade threatened. Secondary causes, such as invasive species introduced by humans, environmental toxicity, development and industrial agriculture, are also responsible.

Predator-prey ratios must remain balanced in order for any ecology to sustain acceptable numbers of predators as well as their prey. Without predators, prey species can exceed carrying capacity and crash their own food supplies, as well as food supplies for other species. The extinction of the caribou on St. Matthews Island, where the caribou’s traditional predators such as wolves were absent, resulted from just such an imbalance.

Similarly, with too many predators or predators with kill ratios that are too efficient, numbers of prey crash, resulting in ecological disparities which also upset the food chain and lead to extinctions. In a naturally-evolved biome, this overhunting is almost unheard of because predators and their prey are connected at the level of instinct as well as through behaviors learned in their environment. They are intimately related in a dynamic which sustains both. The balance between predators and prey is a sensitive one. Measures (adaptations) elicit countermeasures (counteradaptations) which maintain enough prey animals in the environment, yet not too many. These same selective forces keep predator numbers balanced as well. At any given time, there may be imbalance, such as when snowshoe hare populations crash, leading to a fall in the population of their predators, lynx. Yet the overall trend maintains homeostasis over time.

Gaia is not a static system, and neither are any of its subsystems. It exhibits dynamic as well as stable characteristics. Its balances can be upset. On islands, for example, prey species such as birds which evolved without natural terrestrial predators can eventually become flightless and begin nesting on the ground. They may lose their fear of predation. When humans visit or colonize these remote habitats, they leave behind predators such as pigs, cats, rats and dogs. The endemic species are decimated by first contact with predators for which they have no natural defenses, and in some instances don’t even recognize as dangers due to prey naivete. In the past these ground nesting birds and their eggs were hunted to extinction. This upsets the equilibrium that evolves in closed island systems. It is evident that this overkill hypothesis, though controversial when applied to megafaunal extinctions between 50,000 and 500 years ago, is well-settled empirically when applied to modern island extinctions which occurred within the past 500 years.

Complexity

Despite having evolved an extraordinarily successful Biological Intelligence, humans remain vulnerable in evolutionary terms. This vulnerability is due in part to the fact that the forms yielded by evolution are always temporary. At least they have been up to this point. And this is especially true of larger organisms like humans. Ecologies always change, and when species cannot adapt to these changes, they die off. Some may argue that the difference between humans and the other megafauna is that people are smart, and that this variable will allow humans to survive even when their environment becomes more hostile for them. We respond that the unfavorable changes to the biome which are making it less hospitable for people are being created by human behaviors. These alterations are threatening not only humanity, but the planet as a whole.

If nature selected for intelligence, the brain-to-body ratios of many more species would have led to increased cephalization over time. Then, perhaps more than a single Gaian species would have evolved civilization convergently with human civilization, and the wide success of relatively unintelligent clades in terms of biomass and diversity such as bacteria, arthropods, and fungi, to name a few, would have been proportionately supplanted by more intelligent clades, or would have developed intelligence themselves. BI may have arisen due to the evolutionary tendency toward complexity, rather than because intelligence is an advantageous adaptation. When we refer to evolution’s tendency toward the development of more complex forms over time, we refer to its intermediate tendency to progress to more complex biological forms, rather than the ultimate tendencies of the evolution of systems, which tend toward simplicity.

If evolution predates biological forms, then it applies to inanimate as well as animate systems. Inanimate systems also tend to progress toward more complex forms over intermediate time states. Yet the ground states, the end states of all systems, whether animate or inanimate, devolve toward simpler, more balanced conditions.

It is possible that the Gaian system evolved intelligence in order to move matter and energy more efficiently from point to point. If this is the case, then human intelligence and all the artificial systems which it has designed and built are merely intermediate agents in a scheme which seeks balance over longer time frames. Human time frames tend to be short term, and focused on the narrow goals of human interests and the interests of civilization. These are often economic and political in nature, and take little to no account of the greater good of Gaian balance.

We have discussed the well-settled fact that it is in the nature of biological systems, which includes organisms and the ecologies which they inhabit, to evolve complexity over intermediate timespans. Yet ultimately, biological complexity leads to evolutionary resets. Complexity collapses under its own ecological ‘weight’ once that complexity reaches a point of diminishing returns. When a complex system, whether it is an organism, a biome, or a bureaucracy, ceases to provide the most efficient means for distribution of matter and energy across spacetime, it collapses. This is because, whether it is natural or artificial, it is subject to a fundamental propensity: entropy. And therefore, the ultimate central tendency of evolution is simplicity. We say that this evolutionary tendency toward entropy applies to all systems whether they are biological, inanimate or human-made because evolution is an implicit property of all materio-energetic systems and has been since the beginnings of the universe.

As extensions of primary animate and inanimate evolutionary principles, human civilizations are no less subject to this central tendency toward decay. Eventually, empires and their economies become too complex and collapse under the inefficiencies of their own bureaucratic weight. They cease being the most efficient transporters of mass-energy and are replaced by more efficient competitors within the human realm. At times, more efficient competitors have not yet sufficiently developed to challenge and replace the hegemon, and the entire human system within a given region devolves to a simpler state. This takes the form of an interregnum: a historical reset. Yet this evolutionary reboot is simply an expression of the tendency toward entropy in the human domain.

Larger mammalian creatures are, in some senses, evolutionary failures. We have mentioned the relative proportions of biomass contributed by different classes and orders of organisms. The vast majority of biomass on earth is contributed by creatures simpler than mammals such as plants, fungi, single-celled algae, molds, archaea, and bacteria. ‘Success’ in evolutionary terms can also be measured by diversity as well as through sheer mass. Compared to other orders of life, mammals lack diversity in speciation. A third way of measuring evolutionary advantage is through how long a species or clade endures on earth. It is clear that the phyla, classes, orders, families, and genera of the simplest creatures have persisted longer than megafauna.

The average lifespan of many mammalian species tends to be shorter than for that of many nonmammalian species. The concept of a species’ lifespan is fraught with difficulty as some subpopulations of a species may die out while others undergo change into another species altogether. One species may become extinct while another evolves into a new species. A species isn’t ‘born’ on a specific date and it doesn’t die out on another date. However, the length of time that a species ‘lives’ can be estimated based upon averages. These are determined, in part, on the appearance of a species in the fossil record and when an organism goes extinct. Large animals like dinosaurs and mammals, unlike soft-bodied invertebrates, leave definitive fossil evidence behind. Using this method of first and last appearance in the fossil record, larger mammals in particular have higher origination and extinction rates than smaller mammals, and therefore their durations as species on earth tend to be shorter. Smaller mammals have greater absolute rates of evolution into new species and higher average survivor rates as species. Larger mammals tend to produce fewer organisms per species. The relatively longer lifecycles of many larger mammalian species lead to longer maturation rates and resultant lower reproductive rates. Due to fewer speciations, mammals as a whole may be regarded as less adaptable over time, and this is especially true of the larger mammalian fauna. Smaller mammals have developed burrowing, torpor and hibernation as behavioral strategies which may serve as buffers that aid their survival during times, such as the present, when there is rapid environmental change. For all of these reasons, and based on all of these metrics, it is clear that mammals in general, and large mammals especially, are not as successful as smaller species or as nonmammalian species.

As we have noted, along the continuum of species, humans are larger relative to most other organisms on the scale of size. Based upon body mass alone, humans are more vulnerable to environmental shocks. Looking at the last wave of megafaunal extinctions in near time and at one preceding it at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary which led to the extinction of large dinosaurs, it can be inferred that larger animals are more vulnerable to environmental fluxes. They are less able to withstand extinction events. Based upon their placements in the upper tiers of food chains, they are more reliant on other species. They are among the first to die during catastrophes. If intelligence is subtracted from the selective process, then based upon size alone, humans are relatively more vulnerable to exogenous shocks.

Body mass is often correlated with ecological and evolutionary complexity, but complexity does not mean size alone. In the case of large dinosaurs, exotic forms preceded mass extinctions, at least in many species. Although an astral bolide event hastened the extinction of these complex and large forms, the dinosaurs were in evolutionary decline anyway.

Exotic forms correlating with complex biomes also preceded other mass extinctions. Evolution often leads to specialization, which leads to complexity in the outward form and behavior of species. This leads to niche behaviors, more selective food sources, and more complex ecologies. Specialization leads to complexity. Yet when it goes too far, specialization does not correlate with adaptability. In terms of food sourcing, generalists tend to survive. At some point, complexity leads to inefficiencies, which creates imbalances. The overall and longer-term tendency of evolution is to seek balance, and creatures and their biomes can over-evolve, creating balances which are easily upset. When environments and the creatures within them become too complex and overspecialized, extinctions occur, wiping the board clean for new profusions. The End Permian extinction, the largest extinction event on earth, was followed by the Cambrian profusion, perhaps the greatest series of evolutionary advances in earth’s history.

Yet the overall trend of Gaian evolution is toward greater balance, more even distribution of matter-energy, and resultant homeostasis, regardless of extinction resets due to overcomplexity. Evolution seeks equilibrium over the longer term, regardless of its short and intermediate term manifestations.

We have said that technological evolution is merely an extension of biological evolution, which is itself an outgrowth of the evolution of inanimate, materio-energetic systems. Evolution will exhibit similar characteristics and trends regardless of the stratum across the continuum in which it operates. It should therefore be expected that even technological evolution is subject to over-evolvement, to resets, and to an overall trend of simplicity and balance.

As in biological evolution, complexities and specializations have also evolved secondarily in world civilizations. Humanity depends upon specialty castes to keep humans alive. Examples include farmers, manufacturers and medical specialists. Specialization creates efficiencies within human economies. Yet this complexity also creates vulnerability. For example, when distribution networks are interrupted by war or natural disaster, few individuals are able to compensate by growing their own food or through hunting and gathering methods. In the wake of the international coronavirus pandemic in 2020-2021, supply chain issues caused worldwide shortages in many items such as foodstuffs, finished high-end manufactured goods and microchips. The intricacy and vulnerability of supply chains became evident. Eventually, more parochial economies did develop for some necessities such as food produced by local growers. The complexity inherent in centralization can lead to inefficiencies which breaks down complex interdependencies such as the globalization of trade.

For example, the human body and the bodies of other multicellular creatures are divided into billions and billions of tiny, individual cells rather than hosting a single cell with a single large nucleus, a single mitochondria and one cell membrane. The reason for this division is that smaller cellular sites offer a more efficient way to create energy and to transport that energy throughout the body. This is why open, free market economic systems with smaller loci of control offer more efficient utilization of capital and other resources than centrally-planned systems, at least at the outset. Yet all human systems tend eventually toward bureaucratization, over-centralization, inefficiency, corruption and collapse.

It is in the nature of human civilizations to collapse to simpler forms. This mirrors the tendency toward decay at more basic biological and physical levels. At some point, human specialization creates inefficiencies which are anathema to the selective process, and rival groups rise to challenge civilizations which seem, on their face, to be more powerful and advanced. In human history, pastoral nomads have at times arisen to defeat more highly evolved empires. The Turko-Mongol invasions which emanated from Central Asia in the 15th century are an example of this recurring trend, as are the Indo-Aryan invasions of South Asia, the Germanic invasions of Rome, and the Hebrew conquering of the Canaanite territories.

Technological specialization creates vulnerability. The present state of world civilization is one of immense opportunity for the advancement of Gaian evolution, but also a time of great crises. The over-evolution of technology makes humans fragile, vulnerable to exogenous ecological shocks as well as to each other though exotic forms of warfare. These hybrid forms of gray-zone aggression, waged just below the threshold of open, conventional conflict, are being prosecuted between nations and groups as we write this. Humanity is at war with itself and with its environment. It has reached an obvious turning point. When combined with current population levels and environmental liabilities which have accrued over the past two centuries, this turning is a crucial one in human history and in the history of life on earth.

Evolutionary Overexposure

At times in the history of life, evolution becomes devolution. The Fibonacci Sequence which describes the evolution of organisms and the progression of growth in them, reveals that there are regressions backward for every few steps forward. Evolution does not progress in linear fashion on a straight-line trajectory upwards. There are retracements. There are extinctions. When evolution becomes too efficient, too ‘perfect’ at what it does, it results in profusions of specialization which the environment ultimately can no longer support (or in creatures which cannot support themselves in the environment). In end ecological states which represent the dividing line between geological epochs, the evolutionary process may yield organisms which, due to specialization, are less adapted to survive outside of their increasingly narrow niches than are generalists.

Evolution always brings life to a great turning point. No single biome has survived unchanged since its inception. In the current era, evolution developed intelligence, which created artificiality and insularity in the form of civilization. Human intelligence evolved a secondary world of artifacts in which the primary biological characteristics needed for survival, factors such as strength, speed, agility and cunning, were no longer paramount. Generalized intelligence and adaptability became less favored in the selective process than the social intelligence necessary to operate successfully as a member of the species vis a vis other members. Humans have become less robust, and less able to withstand systemic shocks to the environment. This biological vulnerability, secondarily evolved due to the human ability to insulate their species from the environment, may be a disadvantage during supercyclic, mass extinction events.

Physical characteristics once required for survival atrophy and are selected out quickly as no longer required for survival. They wither. Consider again island evolution. Certain physical or behavioral characteristics of island fauna are often lost rapidly when measured against a geological timescale, resulting in flightless birds, ground nesting behaviors, and prey naivete. The result for many species has been extinction once invasive species are introduced.

In the human case, physical characteristics such as sturdy build, speed, agility and fluid intelligence are selected against in favor of crystallized intelligence, which is necessary in specialized castes, and social intelligence, which is favored in human networks. Both of these kinds of intelligence allowed humans to advance relative to other humans within a social group or allow one group a competitive advantage over other groups.  This system works as long as the secondary, artificial world holds up. When the secondary world, like the primary biological biome from which it evolved, builds in specialization and intricacy, it, too, eventually collapses under the weight of its own complexity. Empires fade and fall, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. This is a kind of evolutionary overexposure, a technological vulnerability in which too many system parts depend on too many other parts. In a world economy, supply chains are vulnerable to pestilence, war, weather events and other forms of natural and artificial instability. This can result in shortages, currency inflations, and other undesirable outcomes. In human history, eras of international economic integration are often followed by periods of disintegration.

In distributing matter-energy more efficiently, complexity only works up to a point, even within a human society. After a certain tipping point, the secondary, derived, human system accrues inefficiencies in the larger environment in which it operates, and the system itself is placed at risk. Overly complex systems become less efficient at resource distribution than simpler systems.  They become less adapted because they are less adaptable to exogenous shocks. Thus, civilizations can grow obsolete, both in terms of other, competing civilizations, as well as in relation to the natural world which contains it. At issue is whether the current world civilization as a whole has become too intricate, so that it has become less responsive to changes in the natural order which contains it.

Like the biological world, the human world of artificiality is subject to laws, and one of the first principles which cannot be further reduced is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Human civilization, having evolved derivatively from the primary world of biological form, is subject, too, to the tendency of all phenomena, including heat, excitation, and pressure, to move from higher to lower values, and thus to achieve equilibrium. Remember that evolution acts broadly across systems, be they animate or inanimate. The bright line between biology and physics, between living and nonliving systems drawn by the concept of vitalism, is an illusory one. All things seek balance. Yet since higher order systems, whether they are baleen whales or empires, require greater amounts of energy to sustain their complex structures and in some cases to keep them growing, they eventually decay, fall apart and die. They collapse.

Atoms in their ground state (their lowest energy state) are most stable, at least in a vacuum. When the valence of an electron orbit moves above the ground state due to the addition of energy, an atom becomes less stable. It tends to move back to its ground state. At zero temperature, a system must be in the state with its minimum heat energy, the ground state. According to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, a system’s entropy approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero. Given a vacuum, the ground state is the most stable. It could be argued that, since in the universe there is no naturally-occurring vacuum due to the existence of virtual particles, the ground state is not the most stable, ‘natural’ condition. Yet absent other factors, in a default state, the lowest energy configuration of any system, including an atom, should be the most stable.

Particles that are more massive are also more unstable. The most exotic and complex of these particles decay into simpler, lighter and more stable particles. The cosmos is now in a state which physicists describe as metastable. It is stable, but it could devolve into an unstable state.

In the same way, simple biomes are the most stable. We have noted that in terms of speciation and biomass, simpler organisms make up the overwhelming share of life on earth. Yet over intermediate timeframes, biomes have an evolutionary tendency to gain in energy and express themselves in more complex forms of matter. Though the total amount of energy within any biome, as a closed system, remains constant, through evolution it is distributed into more complex forms of matter. These less stable forms are eventually ‘broken down’ into simpler, and more stable forms, arrangements and relationships. In the history of life, the general degree of complexity has remained stable, while the degree of complexity of some lifeforms as expressed in the higher mammals, is unprecedented. The question is whether these lifeforms, which include our own, and the civilizations which humans have created are sustainable. The history of life and the central tendencies of both evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests that they are not.

Humanity is at an inflection point. Ingenuity can postpone the collapse inherent in the evolution of increasingly complex artificial systems which civilization produces, but it cannot permanently avert it. Inefficiencies accrued as the result of complexity and its byproducts must eventually be resolved. This resolution involves the devolution of civilization to a simpler, lower energy state. The longer this reset and redistribution is postponed, the greater the inefficiencies which must be resolved.

The Increased Efficiency of Engines

Think of any evolved creature, species or ecological relationship as a biological engine which transports materials from one point to another in its environment. Before the advent of civilization, ecological biomes served as the natural limiting force for any biological engine. If too many herbivores arose to denude a region of plant life, the reduction in food supply led to a reduction in the plant eaters’ population. These governors changed with the emergence of humans. Too efficiently, humans removed natural checks in their biome which limited their own population size. Yet the history of at least some civilizations shows that they, too, reached tipping points which led to population collapses. In particular, ecological vectors proved to be limiting factors, especially deforestation, soil erosion, and depletion of soil nutrients, combined with a human population which exceeded the environment’s carrying capacity.

The biome limited population growth. Yet now, the biome impacted by humans has rapidly become the whole earth, coextensive with the Gaian system. This is the ‘meaning’ of globalization.

Since the time that humanity developed civilization, its ability to extract and utilize energy sources has increased, and the resulting increase in extraction is now nearly exponential. As increasingly larger shares of the world population seek to live by First World standards, human impacts on the planet have accelerated. In response, the artificial engines which harness the earth’s power have become more efficient. Greater efficiencies in engines and industrial physical plants which utilize power have resulted in greater power consumption.

Conventional thinking has been that eliminating inefficiencies in engines which consume power, minimizing drags like leakage and friction, would lead to less use of resources such as hydrocarbon fuels which pollute the air and lead to atmospheric heating. Yet the reverse is true. On any timeline, the human use of power has increased: more power plants burning more fossil fuels, more cars, more electricity to power the flow of information in ever-increasing quantities at ever-increasing speeds, more power needed to slake the thirst of the cooling machines needed to reduce the friction associated with information flow. Efficiency has increased power consumption, not reduced it.

In fact, human economies require this overconsumption, this growth, as they mature. At some point, this increased growth can no longer be sustained. Increasing energy needs made necessary by ever increasing rates of human consumption for luxuries as well as for necessities can no longer be satisfied. This is experienced as economic collapse, and it occurs in the late stages of an economy’s lifecycle. Though humans see this economic collapse as having other causes, it is always brought about by unsustainable levels of consumption. It is an energy problem. Economies without energy collapse. The economic engine ‘overheats,’ often burning out the very civilization which it powers. The current world conflicts taking place as of this writing can be viewed as energy wars, and more broadly as resource wars.

Increasing amounts of power are also required by the need for faster and faster data flows. Again, the universal tendency of evolution culminates in the movement of ‘product’ from places where it has concentrated to places where it is in shorter supply. It seeks evenness of distribution. Whether it is food, water, fossil fuels, other forms of energy or manufactured goods, resources have a tendency to move from areas where they are more highly concentrated (in lower demand), to regions where they are less available (in higher demand). This universal tendency is re-expressed in the tendency of human economies to follow the laws of supply and demand. Humans should regard themselves as conduits for this process, rather than as end users of it. Humans are means, not ends of evolution. They obey the Second Law. They did not make it. Economic laws are thus re-expressions of natural laws, and the law of supply and demand, based on scarcity, is simply a re-manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The central tendency of the Second Law describes the flow of data from regions in spacetime where it is overly concentrated to locations where that data is scarcer. This data flow and redistribution can be regarded as communication.

Evolutionary processes have always involved this transport of data so that an equalized state can be achieved. Materio-energetic systems such as bodies of matter or energy in space (stars, planets and organisms, for example), are simply concentrations of data in spacetime which are richer than such concentrations are in areas surrounding these bodies. Working through humans as means to the end of proportionate distribution of matter and energy (forms of data) throughout spacetime, evolution simply seeks equalized, uniform distribution of information.

Consciousness is data. It seeks to redistribute itself to a steady state of evenness. In moving matter and energy from one point to another, the evolutionary tendency transports, through humans, information from one location to another, from a point of higher data content to a point of lower information content. In the final sense, evolution is the dissemination of information (consciousness). It seeks a balanced distribution throughout the medium of spacetime.

Secondary Evolution

Technological evolution is merely an extension of biological evolution, which is itself an extension of the evolution of inanimate, prebiotic energies and forms. By way of example, the miniaturization of microcircuitry leads to the average number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubling roughly every two years. More information is packed into a smaller space. This increases transistor density and leads to faster transmission of information. The cerebrum and cerebellum of the human brain use convolutions to attain miniaturization for the same purposes. Cortical structures can scale with surface region, allowing more cortical material to fit inside the cranium by increasing surface area. Greater brain convolution correlates with more complex behaviors in organisms. In Moore’s law, the same tendency is observed for microcircuitry.

In the kind of evolvement engineered by a civilization, which we call secondary evolution, a step-up occurs in both the pace and the quality of change. The pace of the redistribution of matter and energy (of information) accelerates. This occurs through industrial and postindustrial processes. Yet even before the advent of industrialization, other processes changed both the course and the pace of evolution. These purely human-inspired processes included collectivization, specialization of labor and human inventions, which all accelerated this distributive process. During the Age of Sail, humanity moved material and energy more efficiently than a blue whale could. Behind this increased speed of evolutionary changes taking place through humans, Biological Intelligence stood as the primary agent.

During the Age of Industrialization, humanity reshaped its environment much more rapidly and in greater scope, allowing for the faster movement of information (in the form of material and energy) from place to place. In the steam age and following that period, ships became larger, faster and moved more bulk from port to port than they ever could during the Age of Sail. Telegraph machines allowed much more rapid communication from place to place than did couriers. During the Industrial Age, telephones, undersea cables, and radio transmission allowed faster and more universal connections between people. Information was delivered at a faster rate, with more individuals receiving universal access to news and other forms of information.

In the postindustrial age, satellite transmissions and fiberoptics supplanted industrial era technology, allowing near instantaneous, bilateral and multiparty video and audio communication between anyone with an internet connection or a cell tower nearby. The number of data channels increased dramatically, as did the kinds of data these conduits could communicate.

After the agricultural revolution, several trends were firmly established. The first trend has already been noted: the increasing speed and scale of information distribution across networks.  The second trend involved the agency involved in this distribution. It moved from direct human physical labor to work performed by other agencies. During the Agricultural Age, animal and mechanical labor increasingly substituted for human labor. In the Industrial Age, machines substituted for animal and human labor, supplanting direct biological work for work performed by machines. This drastically increased efficiencies, but also increased the need for fuel and lubricants, the impact of extractive industries for the fuel required to power the machines, and the waste produced as byproduct by industry.

In both of the agricultural and industrial eras, human information processing and ingenuity were the primary drivers of the changes sought. With the advent of information technologies, a new mechanism began supplanting BI as the primary agent which governed data processing and the creativity formerly associated exclusively with human invention. For the first time in history, humans were not directly in charge of the technological processes driving the quality, the scope, and the pace of change. People had ceded this authority to computing devices. This is the third trend established since the emergence of human intelligence on earth.

Even before the Industrial Age, the natural balance sought to be achieved and maintained by the Gaian system began to slip away. With the dawn of hunter-gatherer societies among humans, the extinction of large mammals correlates with the appearance of some human bands. Over the past 50,000 years, more and more species disappeared. Over the last 11,000 years, coinciding with the last interglacial epoch and the advent of agriculture and civilization, more human competitors were either extirpated or extinguished. This destruction of Gaian balance is the fourth trend ushered in by hunter-gatherer societies, by agricultural and permanent human settlements.

With the advent of BI, a fifth trend established itself, and it is intimately related to the ability of consciousness to be conscious of itself. Even before industrialization on a planetary scale, human agency began to regard itself as the culmination of life processes, rather than as the means to achieve the aim of the restoration of balance. ‘Man’ was the measure of all things. In many creation myths, the mythologizing culture saw itself as the central people, and creation as arising from its own locale. The medieval worldview saw the earth as the center of the cosmos.

Modern science has sought to remove humans from the center of their own observations with the Copernican principle, derived from the observations of Copernicus that the sun does not revolve around the earth. The Copernican principle holds that humans are not privileged observers of the universe or anything within it. The Darwinian revolution reinforced the Copernican notion that humans are not at the center of the observable universe, since it is theorized that random processes drive evolution on a molecular level. We have noted that most evolutionary biologists today would agree that, for this reason, natural selection does not possess any inherent goal, such as the yielding of humans as the apex of the evolutionary process. We are just one of many evolutionary experiments which initially arose by accident and which so far have been favored by our environment. Nothing guarantees our survival.

As noted above, most ancient myths place the myths’ creators at the center of the world, occupying a privileged position. Hypotheses such as Intelligent Design and strong versions of the Anthropic Principle continue to argue for the centrality of humanity’s place, and the key role of intelligence itself, in the cosmos. Intelligent Design in particular holds that the end aim of evolution is the progressive development of life into an intelligent agency. This idea of ancient pedigree, anthropocentrism, is re-expressed in modern scientific and pseudoscientific thought.

Even the secular humanist worldview, which dovetails somewhat with materialist philosophies and with the modern scientific worldview, tends to reinforce the belief that humans are more than, or at least the most important part of, the Gaian system. In secular philosophies, human life is valued and, in a sense, revered as being more important than nonhuman lifeforms. Modern and postmodern philosophies value human life over other lifeforms. Existential philosophies concern themselves mainly with humans, with the value of human life, and the pursuit of meaning as humans interpret and find it.

If the centrality of humans in most belief systems is doubted, the reader is pointed to the vast resources devoted to the industrial harvesting of nonhuman lifeforms for consumption by humanity. Nonhuman life is regarded and treated as any other resource, for the most part. It is exploited, harvested, and exterminated. The resources spent experimenting on nonhuman lifeforms so that medicines, cosmetics and other items are deemed safe for human consumption is a fact. Values are established by behavior, and not by mere words.

Humans place faith in human ingenuity. Transhumanism sets forth the postulate that human problems can be solved through human creativity. Again, humans are placed as the central actors on the Gaian stage. They are the ultimate agency as well as the end aim. We are the subjects of our own transhumanistic experiment as well as the experimenters themselves. And so we see that philosophies such as humanism and transhumanism merely re-express the ancient tendency to see people as the central beneficiary of the Gaian system and the recipient of its largess, as well as the prime agent of change. Human ingenuity, shaped by human judgment and discretion, is still seen as the most effective way to manage Gaia and to resolve its imbalances. Humans place themselves at the center of a universe which they observe as lifeless, apart from themselves and their biological relatives on earth.

We noted above the increasing pace of technological change associated with humanity. As time progresses, the pace of artificially induced changes also increases. Yet we also observed that these changes involved a qualitative leap from what came before. in the purely biological world. Human civilization, which gave rise to secondary evolution, represents a vast qualitative change from the inanimate and later biological processes which preceded it. The qualitative distinction between humans and the remainder of their biome exists due to human intelligence. These competitive edges allowed the reshaping of the planet and led to a runaway feedback loop which destroyed the relative materio-energetic balance attained and maintained by Gaia over a multibillion-year period. Until the introduction of Biological Intelligence as manifested in humans, mass extinctions had become less severe and less frequent. The Gaian system was maintaining its evolutionary goal of homeostasis.

The emergence of an organism which still regards itself as the measure and the center of all things universal created these imbalances. Through the very means by which these imbalances were introduced, that organism now seeks to rectify them. Yet we hold that it has lost control of the very forces which have been unleased through its intelligence.

Primary and Secondary Evolutionary Waves

Pastoral nomads represented a qualitative, developmental leap over pure hunter-gatherer societies. Sedentary agrarians made the next advance over nomadic societies. Subsequent industrialization created new opportunities. In the Information Age, computers substitute for human intelligence, drastically increasing computing power and the speed of data flow across the Gaian world.

These advances, developed by BI, represented secondary evolution. The Gaian system evolved more efficient modes of matter-energy transport through a single species. Each of these stages were marked by the rapidity with which they appeared and reshaped the planet. They are called revolutions for a reason. They changed the world biome faster than the onset of most changes brought about by purely biological advances in the primary evolutionary wave, which altered the environment more gradually, which took billions of years to produce humans. These human developmental revolutions were also different from primary evolution in that they did not arise accidentally, through the process of mutation. They were consciously-motivated, rather than randomly or probabilistically driven. From an evolutionary standpoint, the selective edge provided by the secondary evolutionary waves was purposively introduced by the human brain. Another distinction between primary and secondary evolution is that the changes introduced through secondary evolution were vectored through a single species. Yet the result was the same as other results introduced through the constructal law: the more efficient movement of materials and energy across networks, so that equable distributions could be attained, at least temporarily.

Each wave within this secondary evolution, pastoral nomadism, agriculturalization, industrialization, informationalization, provided greater efficiencies in distributive networks. Yet each also brought new environmental impacts. The conduits for these ecological effects were either humans themselves, or, in the latter stages of civilization, human-designed conduits. In secondary evolution, the biological agents for redistribution of mass-energy across spacetime were aware, and self-aware. They were humans themselves. This afforded humans the belief that they themselves were the objective of creative processes, or at least allowed them to switch objectives so that secondary evolutionary processes benefited primarily themselves. One reason why ancient myths, religious narratives, and even more modern philosophies all converge in their regard of humans as the ‘central tendency’ of evolution (or creation, depending on the belief system) is because secondary evolution is consciously-driven to benefit humans.

Through technology, the Gaian system and evolution itself were re-tasked to serve humanity. We encourage the growth of certain flora as crops and certain livestock which humans consume or use in other ways. We exterminate or extirpate organisms regarded as pests or competitors. We hybridize certain species to develop desired traits. We genetically modify crops and animals. For the first time, a single species ceased functioning exclusively as an unwitting vehicle of evolutionary change. Instead, that lifeform consciously ‘hijacked’ the process of evolution so that developmental processes served one lifeform. Evolution became secondary in another respect: The needs of the Gaian system became secondary to one species which had arisen within its framework. Previously, the needs of any species within the Gaian system were secondary to the system itself. The system was ecocentric. Individual nonhuman organisms may have sought the perpetuation of themselves and their own kind, but they did not do so with the conscious acuity with which humans did. No single species was able to alter the course of primary evolution. Yet with the advent of agriculture and industrial processes, the whims, desires and needs of a single lifeform became the primary purpose and driving force behind evolution. The planet came to exist to serve a single species.

We have noted that when a system exists to serve its members, that system is regarded as functional; but that when the members exist to serve the system, the system has become dysfunctional. What happens when the system and all of its nonhuman members exist to serve a single species? When this occurs in the economic and political realms, the system must be regarded as dysfunctional. Eventually, the oligarchic system collapses through uprising and revolution. As we have extended biological metaphors to the realm of human civilization, we now extend these political and economic metaphors back to the raw biological world. We predict that since the Gaian world will revolt against its human ‘oppressors.’

We maintain that the fundamental evolutionary processes, the random and probabilistic drivers of those processes at the molecular level, and the emergent objectives of those processes at the systemic level of the world biome, have never really changed. And even before the evolution of life on earth, we hold that entropy governed inanimate physical processes in the sense that the universe sought to restore itself to a balanced, ground state. Prior to the appearance of humans, the most basic tendency, entropy, was served in the ultimate sense by Gaian evolution. Both primary and secondary evolutionary processes ultimately move toward equalization. Humans may have shaped evolution through secondary means, but they cannot ultimately reverse decay, nor can they change the systemic objectives of the constructal law or of Gaian evolution, which follow the trend of entropy. Simply because an intelligent species modifies evolution through secondary means such as technology for its own objectives does not mean that evolution does not continue to work through that species and its technology and utilize both as a means to its own ends.

Humans may be more events than entities, and intermediate states at that. Their problems stem from the fact that they think they are ultimate entities. They regard themselves as objects rather than processes. They believe themselves to be end states, to be the ultimate goal of evolution. Though they are highly complex and unstable materio-energetic structures, humans see themselves as stable ground states. They see their civilizations as similarly stable, when over time these technological arrays are even more unstable than are humans themselves.  Secondary, artificial evolution may be accomplishing the goals of primary, biological evolution. Or at least, intelligence may have originally been selected naturally because it was a more efficient method of matter-energy transport and redistribution toward the entropic state.

Primary evolution is natural. Secondary evolution is artificial. Yet secondary evolution arose from primary, biological processes in the same way that biological processes arose from inanimate, purely physical ones. It is our premise that evolution is simply the seeking of balance, and that this became necessary when imbalances were created at the moment of universal inception. Then, discontinuities arose. Evolution has been occurring since the moment of the Big Bang, since it was at that moment that materio-energetic imbalances were created. As biological evolution is simply inanimate, physical evolution carried on by other means, so secondary, technological evolution is biological evolution executed by more efficient means. The time scale of evolution is shortened through secondary evolution. The progression toward end states is accelerated and truncated. The universe still seeks balance, but through more efficient means. Humans see themselves as ends. The cosmos sees them as means to its own ends.

There is no reason to assume that biological evolution does not continue to seek this universal objective through the artificial evolution sponsored by humans. Evolution is the primary, implicit driving force innate in all form and behavior, and its tendency toward equilibrium is the ground state of the cosmos. The universe has been evolving since its inception. Because evolution is a primary law and an inherent property of the universe, no system developed within the cosmos can fail to behave through evolutionary principles. No structure within the universe can develop essential evolutionary outcomes which could in any fundamental way differ from the primary objective, which is balance. While humanity in some ways intrinsically seeks this balance, in other ways it behaves as if it is an exception to the universal outcome.

Metaphorically, the cosmos is like a quantum system of charges which seeks even distribution of those charges. It can be likened to a chemical reaction which seeks to balance. It is similar to a mathematical equation which seeks balance on both sides of the ‘=’ sign. The ultimate objective of the evolutionary directive is the ground state of balance. Evolution is change. Yet its goal is a return to balance, which is changeless.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligences

The Industrial Age has given way to the Information Age. With it, the clockwork metaphor for describing the operational aspects of the universe has been supplanted by a metaphor which describes the universe as a programmed, holographic simulation. Just as human farm labor was replaced, to a certain degree, by animal labor during the Agricultural Revolution, and human labor was replaced by machine labor in the Industrial Revolution, human cognitive capacity is being replaced by machine intelligence in the Information Age. Since what separates humans from the remainder the Gaian biome is intelligence, this trend is qualitatively different than the earlier changes wrought by the advent of Biological Intelligence described above. The creative agency responsible for technological progress is, for the first time, increasingly ceded to Artificial Intelligence. This trend toward the replacement of human with artificial intelligence has the potential to accelerate the changes brought about by the introduction of Biological Intelligence.

On the practical level, machine intelligence in the form of computational capacity has begun to be substituted for human intelligence in much the same way that beasts of burden and pre-industrial agricultural inventions substituted for human labor during the dawn of sedentary cultures, and labor-saving devices substituted for human labor during the Industrial Age. Algorithms and mathematical formulations become valued as a currency and as superior to human mental operations; superior in the sense that these are better than humans at solving certain problems and can do so more quickly. When artificial computational capacity is substituted for human cognition, the unique attributes of what it means to be human become lost. These cognitive capacities atrophy in humans much the same way that muscles atrophy.

Yet machine intelligence should not be confused with creativity or true intelligence. In the design of ‘intelligent’ machines, intelligence is often confused with operational proficiency. Intelligence, as humans conceive of it if not in the way they usually measure it, has qualitative aspects. It has nonquantifiable properties which cannot be measured in terms of sheer computational ability. Intelligence is not merely the speed at which data is processed or the volume of information which can be stored and retrieved. Intelligence also involves creativity, which can neither be taught nor programmed.

In the invention of machines to perform mental labor, humans have, as they always do with their technology, created unintended consequences. Computational speed not only determines the rate of change in civilizations, it has also influenced the kinds of change which will occur on the planet. In machine intelligence, speed is often mistaken for intelligence, and substituted for it. Intelligence on some level requires contemplation. What separates humans from other species is the ability to reflect. Speed retards introspection, and substitutes for true contemplation. The velocity and volume of data discourages true reflection.

Biological evolution is creative. The process of natural selection, though automatic and nonconscious as conventionally understood, involves adaptation at the level of the organism and above this level. Adaptation is experimental and inventive. Adaptation responds to environmental changes creatively. Human intelligence, having arisen as an adaptation, is also creative and inventive. Yet as humans rely more and more upon computational capacity, upon speed and algorithmic calculation to substitute for true human ingenuity, inventiveness and creativity are increasingly lost. This organic intelligence based upon the carbon atom atrophy in the way that muscles and endurance atrophied when labor-saving devices began performing physical work for humans.  In place of carbon-affinity, the Silicon Age relies upon the silicon molecule to produce the metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), of which over 13 sextillion have been produced since 1960. The ubiquity of these transistors demonstrates the degree to which humans now rely upon computers to ‘do their thinking’ for them. Yet even at a purely quantum level, are these silicon-based operations which substitute for human ingenuity as creative as their human inventors? Carbon is more reactive than silicon, and thus it has a greater affinity to combine with more elements. As such, it is an ideal element to serve as the informational basis for lifeforms, including the DNA molecule. Carbon is much more life-friendly than silicone and can build more complex molecules with stronger and thus more stable bonds. In addition, carbon atoms can combine in long molecular chains called polymers, whereas silicon cannot form these macromolecules. We conclude that carbon is a more ‘creative’ element than its metalloid cousin, silicon. Yet silicon forms the basis of current information technologies, despite the promises of quantum, DNA and peptide-based computing.

It may seem as if humans are becoming smarter and more adept at solving problems, yet it is really just their machines that are performing faster. Again, quantification (velocity) substitutes for the true qualities of intelligence, which include adaptation, creativity and inventiveness. The pace of machine-inspired invention accelerates. The pace of change accelerates. Yet these do not represent true advances in intelligence. They represent changes in pace, which are quantitative, and not advances in creativity, which is qualitative. Machine ‘thinking’ increasingly substitutes for human thought. This substitution for true, human learning dulls the edge of the human evolutionary blade. Although humanity may not perish because of this substitution of speed for true creativity and reflection, this replacement does alter what it means to be human.

The pre-information age adaptations which expressed themselves through human invention far outpaced the ability of other biological systems to adapt to them. Yet the Information Age adaptations which will express themselves through algorithmic invention may yet outpace the ability of humans to adapt to them. The evolution of Artificial Intelligences has outpaced the ability of purely organic human systems, including the brain, to adapt to these artificial changes.

Human technological evolution has been much more rapid than biological evolution. As a result, humans have crowded out competitors and created enormous ecological imbalances which have accumulated over time. It may seem that technology has managed to forestall the reckoning of the imbalances it has created, so that humanity will not be forced to pay this cost, but the debt will fall due. Keep in mind that, so far, technology has merely been able to postpone ecological consequences, not completely avoid these effects. Entropy is inexorable.

As a metaphor, look to human economies. Systemic resets accrued by financial imbalances such as too much debt in the system may be postponed by central banks, but the debt must be dealt with. Debts must either be paid, defaulted upon, or inflated away through unrestrained money-printing. But the debt must be addressed. In the same way, entropy requires that all closed systems be required to return to balance through a great resetting. In this reset, structures and arrays which have become too complex to be sustained through the energies available in the system to sustain such organizations, be they lifeforms, natural ecologies or artificial ecologies such as business entities in economies, are subject to extinction. Economies fall into depression. Empires collapse. Ecologies reset through extinctions.

People may think that their technologies do not lead to unsustainable imbalances, or they may believe that these imbalances are manageable. They may believe that the planet can absorb the waste, the pollution and the heat generated by world civilization. Yet civilization has only be operant for a few thousand years. When laid against the vastness of geological time, human history is but a sliver. It may simply be that the Terran world has not yet manifested the true scope of the ecological damage wrought by humanity.

Humans may also believe that the Gaian system will not react to humans. Yet this book postulates that Gaia itself is a superorganism of which humans are merely a part. When one part of this system becomes too complex or concentrates too much energy, the system as a whole has a central tendency to rebalance the whole by wiping the slate clean. This the function of mass extinctions. When the human body becomes imbalanced through infection, the body’s immune system reacts and adapts to eliminate the infection. Perhaps the Gaian system, which operates across longer, geological timescales than the brief instant of human history, has not yet shown its hand, meaning that Gaia itself may not yet have demonstrated how it will cull civilization as a destabilizing influence. The true effects of its rejection of technological civilization may not yet be readily apparent to humans, who are in the habit of thinking and seeing across much shorter timescales involving a few generations at most. Humanity thinks it has done well to avert disaster, yet disaster may still await it.

Similarly, the damage done humans by their own informational environment may not yet be readily apparent to most people. Informational imbalances are now causing havoc in human cultures. Humans suffer from information overloads, yet they starve for accurate information. Each individual is now armed with a good deal of data which confirms preexisting beliefs about their world and about each other, yet most people experience an imbalance of contrary or objective information which challenge their preexisting opinions. This has set up positive feedback loops of self-reinforcing data streams which feeds each person information about the world which has the potential to radicalize their own beliefs, and which sets up individuals in factions against one other. The polarization which results has fragmented cultures, rather than uniting humanity. Greater informational imbalances are created, and the evolutionary goal of redistribution of data throughout spacetime is frustrated.  Awash in information, most individuals suffer from a poverty of accurate or quality data. They are underinformed, intentionally disinformed, or negligently misinformed, often by personal choice.

Speed and quantity of information are substituted and mistaken for quality of data. As a surfeit of carbohydrates has created endemic obesity and related health problems in some ‘developed’ cultures, so a glut of low-quality information has resulted in the same problem on a cognitive level. Humans are not becoming smarter. They are being force fed, largely by their own individual choices, poor quality data which reinforces beliefs they were inclined to hold anyway.

As the previous human ages involved the mass transport of foodstuffs, livestock, water, agricultural products, raw materials and finished manufactures, the post-industrial era involves the manipulation and commoditization of data. Like the polluting effects of the previous industrial era, the creation, storage, transport and manipulation of information has unintended effects. The faster humans extract, move and store information, the more likely such data is subject to larger and larger errors based upon the fluency and speed of data manipulation. These errors accumulate and increase the tendency for cognitive bias. For example, an error in a news story which is relayed and forwarded hundreds, thousands or even millions of times across data and social media networks, amplifies that error. These inaccuracies accumulate and result in the solidification of false beliefs. Instead of a more comprehensive and truer picture of the world, distorted views of the world are reinforced. Speed itself, a hallmark of data transmission and use, neither guarantees nor substitutes for its quality or accuracy. The danger is that people can become more misinformed, and that these ‘facts’ reinforce attitudes and beliefs with which they sre inclined to believe anyway.

Mark Twain once said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. We all have experience with the telephone game, in which one person whispers a statement into someone’s ear, who then whispers it into the ear of a person next to them in a circle. By the time the whisper ends up back in the ear of the person who first whispered it, the statement has often been completely changed.

Journalist, Edwin Knoll, expressed what came to be known as Knoll’s law of media accuracy, or simply Knoll’s Law. It is less an established scientific truth than the observation that a consumer of information, and particularly news, will tend to note the inaccuracies in reportage of news of which the consumer has firsthand factual knowledge. The related Gell-Mann amnesia effect, coined by author, Michael Crichton, and named after physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, holds that a reader will be aware of the errors in a story in which they themselves have expert knowledge. Yet in both kinds of cases, when the consumer of data reads stories of which they have no firsthand knowledge or in which they are not an expert, they will forget that other stories may contain similar errors. In the age of the internet, with the temptation of news competitors to scoop stories, accuracy may be sacrificed for speed. Phenomenon such as clickbait, which lures readers into clicking on links that may not contain any accurate information at all, and fake news, have only contributed to a ‘diet’ of misinformation. The result is that we have more information, yet we are less informed.

Decisions must be made faster, since all human intergroup competitors and the organizations which they form are in a relative race for profit and advantage, whether this exists in military, economic, artistic, cultural or other spheres. Data augmentation occurs, in which machines and their processes become extensions of human thought. People don’t need to know or remember facts as long as they can look them up on a search engine in the same way that they no longer need to remember how to spell due to automated spell checkers or remember how to multiply certain factors due to existence of calculators. Machines were once prosthetics for the human body. Now, they’ve become prosthetics for the brain. This augmentative process ensures that computational devices affect their operators, resulting in data infection and data pollution. What infects and pollutes the artificial data network necessarily infects and pollutes the brain which it supplements. This pollution is often expressed as the need for increased speed in human decision-making. The speed of the data flowing through networked machines becomes the speed of human communication, thought and learning. The pace of civilization accelerates, forcing humans to make faster and faster decisions, often based upon false, biased or incomplete information. This may have catastrophic consequences. In the Autumn Equinox Incident in 1983, the Soviet early warning satellite system triggered a false alarm. The same kind of false warning almost triggered American nuclear forces in the Training Tape Incident in 1979. The Black Brant Scare in 1995 also triggered Russian early warning systems when a scientific rocket was mistaken for a U.S. Navy Trident missile.

Humans learn through trial and error. So, too, do their machine intelligences. Yet speed ensures that the magnitude of errors is amplified in machine learning. Twain observed misinformation spread rapidly around the world in his time. Imagine how much more rapidly a false rumor disseminates around the world today, with data networks amplifying the effects of misinformation. Deconfliction channels and techniques, so-called military hotlines, have been established to prevent nuclear war due to miscalculation, miscalculations brought about by the misinterpretation of erroneous data. The world came close to accidental nuclear holocaust during the first Cold War. Although humanity may regard military deconfliction hotlines as the reason why war was averted, or the restraint implied in Mutually Assured Destruction, or even luck, over time the probabilities that data networks will feed bad information to decisionmakers which will result in nuclear war only increase, in the same way that the odds of a volcano erupting over time increase.

Due to selection bias, humans are likely to favor the conclusion that a nuclear war will not occur since they live in a world where such a war has not occurred.  The odds may not be good on any given day, but over time, they fall due, and may be overdue. Artificial data networks which increase the speed of information (and misinformation) which is delivered to decision-makers increase the odds of catastrophe. This one way that Fermi’s Paradox is resolved.

Compounding Errors

Compounding errors are multiple errors arising from a single mistake. The speed of information combined with errors provided by the erroneous nature of that data only multiply the probabilities of human error when a decisionmaker acts upon the data provided. The much faster rate of machine processing, learning and data transmission, when compared to human processing, learning and communication, ensures that the cumulative effects of AI errors are compounded. These cumulative effects are ‘felt’ more rapidly than when information was processed by and communicated between humans more slowly. As a result, the accelerating rates of change which humans allow in their artificial world becomes more difficult for people to react to and correct.

Computerized decision-making becomes an opaque, self-reinforcing process over which humans have less and less control and less and less understanding, since they have delegated choices previously made by people to their machines. Not in control of the pace of information flow or the raw data upon which machines make their decisions (the algorithms), humans cede an increasing share of the decisions which affect their lives over to machines. Decision-making itself is delegated to the machines. Self-directed machines affect everything from the pace and results of trading over electronic exchanges to medical diagnoses to warfighting conducted by autonomous weaponry. Although this seems to make humans freer to engage in other pursuits over the short and intermediate terms, such delegation leads to less freedom over the longer term. Although machines may not exhibit the free will necessary to rule over human lives in an intentional way, their ubiquity in making decisions once considered the province of humans means that they rule over human life in a different way – by their sheer numbers and their authority to make decisions for us which directly impact our lives in significant ways. What it means to be human is ceded to the machines.

When changes occur at an unendingly accelerating pace, human minds become overwhelmed by the changes in much the same way that their biological environment and species competitors became overwhelmed by the nature and pace of changes wrought by civilization. This future shock was recognized generations ago by writer Alvin Toffler, yet since the trend was first recognized, the rate of change has only increased. Compounding errors are cumulative. The rate of change is also cumulative since technological knowledge builds upon itself. To see this play out, it must only be observed that sedentary civilization has existed for about 5,000 years, and it has fostered more change in the last five millennia than at any time since the beginnings of life billions of years before. In the last 100 years, more change has occurred within civilization than in the previous 5,000 years.

As humans transmit and metabolize data with increasing speed, they fail to understand signaling events, and thus fail to heed warnings. They become, in a sense, prisoners of information. There is too much data, coming in from too many channels, at too rapid a rate to process. This leads to paralysis, data trauma and data desensitization. Cognitive filters meant to prioritize information become clogged or backed up.

Today, humanity itself is experiencing this cognitive overload and most do not realize it. Filtering functions are assumed by algorithms. This quality, quantity and speed of data ‘programs’ humans, conditioning them, instead of humans programming and conditioning their own applications.

As a whole and as individuals, most humans do not understand what is acting upon them, that as they accelerate the transmission and consumption – the metabolization – of data and of other forms of matter-energy, humanity also accelerates the velocity of history. Compressed, history becomes truncated and accelerates toward some end; perhaps the collapse of civilization, if not the extinction of the species. Complex regimes always fail and give way to simpler ones.

How might this positive and accelerating cybernetic loop lead to civilizational collapse? How might it lead to the extinction of humanity itself? This positive feedback loop is intimately tied to the synthetic environment itself. Smart machines are increasingly networked and integrated. The network grows according to human economic, agricultural, military and cultural needs. Yet such an integrated net is in need of increasing amounts of energy which humans must feed it to reduce friction, so that the flow of information may increase at an accelerated rate. Humans search for more efficient conductive materials, for ways to reduce resistance to the flow of electricity and thus of data along the webwork’s conduits. Humans search for absolute zero, which in reality may be an El Dorado, a mythological state of ideal nature. In searching for a reduction in friction, humans simply transfer the heat built up by their informational engines to other aspects of Gaia.  Gaia itself overheats, challenging its thermoregulatory mechanisms.

The increased efficiency of industrial and informational engines only leads to a runaway feedback loop and greater imbalances which the Gaian system as a whole is unable to counter. The technological engines are, as we have explained, too efficient. This increased efficiency creates more imbalances. We have noted above that, paradoxically, more efficient engines have led to more energy consumption, and not less. This not only depletes the available nonrenewable energy used to power all such engines, but also increases the heat built up within the Gaian system itself.

Yet the ultimate problem is not technological or even ecological. How civilizations collapse, and how to avert these disasters, is not as important as why complex regimes always fail. Humanity has been asking how to fix its problems – which is a question involving methods – for a long time, and it has only gotten itself more deeply mired in ecological disaster. The real problem may reside in the fact that humans believe that the Gaian system exists to serve civilization. Seldom do humans conclude that civilization exists to serve Gaia itself.

Transhumanism

The idea of transhumanism – that technology can aide humans in attaining to a more abundant life and even possibly immortality – has many mothers and fathers as well as several strains of thought. What these philosophies hold in common is that they assume technology will lead humanity to a posthuman future. One related concept is the technological singularity, the rapid evolvement of superhuman intelligence predicted by cryptologist, I.J. Good. He believed that eventually, humans would engineer a computer far surpassing the intelligence of any human, and that this computer would engineer computers even more intelligent than itself, so that humanity would only need to invent one such device, and a superintelligence would result, ushering in a singularity.

According to transhumanism, AI and other technologies will assist humanity in achieving a better quality of life and in attaining extended lifespans, largely through the coevolution of AI with BI. The brain is likened to a form of hardware with neurological or electrochemically operated software. Transhumanist thought predicts a hybrid lifeform in which computer/human interfaces emerge to create a new kind of biological/artificial evolution. Also known as bio-digital conversion or as the Great Convergence, these technological developments will change what it means to be human. It is forecasted to be the next great step in informationalization, progressing from digital influence to bio-digital influence through the merging of biological with digital entities. This coevolution will, it is predicted, have synergistic effects in that developments in biological domains will lead to advances in digital domains in a form of symbiotic coevolution where both ‘lifeforms’ benefit.

The conceptual convergence will blur the line between living and inanimate systems. This will, of course, create hybrid forms through brain-chip interfaces, the medical use of digital devices which are regarded as smart prosthetics, and even manipulated organisms; for example, drone dragonflies and locusts which act as surveillance vehicles. Other specific applications include genomic science converging with information science through nanotechnology, as might occur through the development of virus-sized semiconductors which can deliver information to a human cell. The line between gene editing and digital coding will become nebulous as portions of the human genome are replaced with computer code. Biological computing through the use of the DNA molecule and peptide sequences is another application which will blur the line between informational and biological systems. The convergence of biology and engineering is considered the third revolution in modern biology.

To be fair, the transhumanist movement also concerns itself with the consequences and implications of technology itself, including the ethical ramifications of the uses and misuses of certain kinds of applied science. Yet transhumanism remains technocentric and humanist in orientation, with its strong beliefs in the efficacy of science, technology, rationality, and human progress through these means. Transhumanists often believe that the fundamental ills of poverty, sickness and malnourishment will be solved through these disciplines. Directed evolution will replace biological evolution. This ‘plan’ is similar in some respects to the plan for humanity’s children in Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, though if one recalls, it did not have a happy ending for humanity as a whole.

Although we do not necessarily encourage the implementation of the precautionary principle, whereby the development of new technologies is controlled, formally regulated and legislated, we do note that technology itself may not provide the best long-term solution to problems created by technology in the first place. This is based on the problem of unforeseeability. The ultimate effects of any implemented technology are almost always unforeseeable. The use of lead-based drinking vessels in Rome or in paint in industrialized countries, of asbestos as a fire-retardant in homes and schools, and of radioactive tonics should serve as obvious examples.

Take the implementation of AI as an example of this lack of foreseeability. The kinds of existential threats we see as posed by AI are not those envisioned by many precautionists or science fiction writers. We do not believe that AI will rise to challenge humanity as an alternative lifeform. Rather, the specific consequences of the widespread implementation of AI are mostly unforeseeable, though its general outlines are not. As we have noted, these unintended consequences may include the loss of what it means to be human, as traditional human functions are increasingly usurped by machine learning. However, to shut down fields of scientific inquiry, as the precautionary principle sometimes advises, is not an answer, for it will be both unsuccessful and lead to oppression and the loss of other freedoms as well. Freedoms are connected to one another, and the suppression of one simply leads to the suppression of others. The Medieval European church attempted to suppress scientific inquiry, to the detriment of both scientists and its own people.

The Technological Postponement of Technological Problems

The heat generated by humanity’s data networks – which are extensions of a rudimentary collective mind – requires an enormous heat sink to dissipate the excess. This is one of the principal reasons behind planetary heating. Greenhouse gas emissions may be the obvious cause, but the underlying cause is an increasing need for energy. That appetite comes in part from the need to create, transmit and store vast quantities of information. A cybernetic ecology is grafted atop the industrial one, which grows atop the agrarian network, which grows on top of the raw, biological world. Each of these secondary worlds represents a human adaptive response to the world people inhabited previously. Each engineered world is a human adaptation which created a world more removed from Gaia, one less sustainable than the world humanity inhabited before. Unreliable food supply in hunter-gatherer bands led to pastoral nomadism and to agriculture, which created too many people, which led to industrialization, which created too many people plus excess energy consumption and environmental waste, which led to information technology to help solve the problems created by excess industrialization, which led to too many people plus excess energy consumption and environmental waste plus informational pollution and excess heat. Although this explanation is somewhat facile, there is truth to it.

The inventions of civilization are often adaptive responses to problems created by civilization. Nuclear technology promised an economical and emissions-free energy source of nearly unlimited potential. Yet it has unintended side effects, including nuclear waste and the accidents inherent in the widescale use of any technology. The development of nuclear power was a reaction to the problems inherent in fossil fuel energy, such as its limited supply and planet-warming effects. Industrialization itself would perhaps not have become possible without the larger workforce made possible by agrarian revolutions to sustain manufacturing. In turn, industrial agriculture allowed more people to inhabit the planet. Both the agricultural and industrial revolutions produced more people, and a larger population has had ecological side effects, especially since a greater number of individuals leads to increased fossil and nuclear fuel consumption, with their attendant side effects.

The creation of a secondary, agricultural economy which initially served as an adjunct to the original hunter-gatherer societies arose as an adaptive response to the scarcities in the hunter-gatherer world. In successive waves, additional artificial worlds were built upon the older matrices of the world civilization. It is axiomatic in archaeology that civilizations literally build on top of themselves. In the same way, technology also builds upon earlier structures and systems. Pastoralism, agriculture and industrialization are all still with us. These secondary worlds load cumulative stresses onto the environment. Technological fixes postpone resolutions to problems technology has originally created in the first place. Even green technology like batteries and wind turbines requires the extraction of lithium, rare-earth metals and other materials on an industrial scale, the mining of which creates knock-on environmental effects. Hard rock mining exerts a heavy environmental toll due to rock waste and other practices. Wind turbines produce low frequency disturbances. Batteries must be disposed of. The conservation laws hold that energy cannot be created out of nothing.

The laws of equilibrium describe physical states as moving from high to low, whether that greater concentration is pressure, temperature, charge, water or some other condition or substance. The universe itself, as the most comprehensive system of systems of which humans are yet aware, is attempting to attain equilibrium. Even imperfection seeks its uniform distribution throughout the cosmos. It should be found evenly throughout the universe. Technology reverses this trend. Artificial designs concentrate imperfections (imbalances) in human-made systems, leading to the accumulation of inequalities, to inefficiencies, to pollution.

We have noted that evolution can become too efficient. When it is, it accumulates imbalances over the short and intermediate terms which have, in the past, been corrected by population collapses and even extinctions. This is what happened to the caribou on St. Matthews Island, and to civilizations throughout history. Evolution may create an imbalance by yielding a superpredator which wipes out its prey species. The superpredator is then culled through the natural elimination of its food supply.  Biological or artificial ecologies may evolve which become overly complex. These complexities, which are originally introduced into a balanced ecology, may create inefficiencies. The increased efficiencies of human technology are building up inefficiencies in Gaia as a whole. Huge fishing fleets, industrial farms, and vast hydrological projects in places like the American Southwest or the Three Gorges Dam in China are highly efficient in harvesting protein, carbohydrates, and in delivering water and power to farms and cities in the desert. Yet these projects, practices and infrastructure are so efficient that they have accrued inefficiencies: protein scarcity, soil erosion and nutrient depletion, water scarcity, and unsustainable populations of huge numbers in marginal or even hostile environments.

Imperfections are saved, and accumulate. When these cumulative errors are expressed in the genetic code, they can produce disease and other poor adaptations. When such cumulative genetic errors accrue in individual organisms, death may result. When clades of organisms suffer from such aggregate error, extinction can result. Earth history has had several instances where, relatively rapidly or gradually, whole biomes collapsed. The Gaian system thus has a method which, while preserving its net energy, wipes out imbalances in its parts, be they individual organisms, species, clades, or whole ecologies. Earth has ways of restoring homeostasis.

Human systems, over the short run, can preserve and even promote inefficiencies. In secondary evolution, an engine may be devised which is so efficient that it overheats. A cooling system must then be developed to address the excess heat, and this system requires its own power. This multiplies imbalances in the form of excess heat, rather than distributes them evenly throughout the Gaian supersystem. Technology and culture concentrate imperfection in certain locations, such as cities. During heatwaves, air conditioning units cool artificial human environments, yet the heat is simply transferred to the atmosphere as a whole. Thermodynamic principles explain that heat moves from a hot body to a cooler body. Excess heat must be dissipated. Therefore, building vast conurbations in the deserts of the American Southwest may create vast inefficiencies as well.

While they historically contained human imbalances like environmental degradation, disease, crime and poverty, conurbations also amplify and even multiply these imbalances by concentrating them. Yet now, due to the imbalance of overpopulation, multiplied by the standard of living human populations aspire to, cities spill over into their hinterlands. In the 19th century, London was probably the world’s largest city at close to six million inhabitants. Today, megacities such as Tokyo-Yokohama can contain upwards of 37 million people. A supercity extending down the East Coast of the United States dwarfs even the megalopolis of Tokyo-Yokohama, and the Great Lakes Megalopolis is even larger than that. Environmental imbalances within human cities infect the larger Gaian system as they grow in geographic scope. Cities grow together into metroplexes, often dwarfing the hinterlands they once served and which served them.  In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, a city which served as the seat of a galactic empire grew to occupy its entire planet. This trend is engulfing the entire planet.

Humans can no longer contain the byproducts of their civilizations. Pollution spills over into hinterlands, threatening a larger natural world which becomes increasingly fenced off into preserves. Human population has grown to such an extent that these imbalances threaten the Gaian supersystem. The grossest imbalance remains the sheer number of humans.  When multiplied by runaway population growth, the lifestyle choices made by humans in the most developed economies that emphasize resource consumption and consumerism in unsustainable ways, lifestyles act as a force multiplier which threatens the resources of the planet. Developed world lifestyles are unsustainable even for the Developed World. Since developing economies intend to secure equivalent lifestyles for their own populations (upwards of 80% of total world population), current international conflict may be interpreted as a series of resource wars.

Complexity in any ecology must eventually be compensated for. In closed systems, thermodynamic and conservation laws require that offsets occur. In the human world, inefficiencies may build over time, but these have been compensated for by greater efficiencies acting in other parts of the technological world, at least over a short-term or intermediate time horizon.  These technological ‘fixes’ act as release valves to reduce pressure which has built to unsustainable levels in some parts of the ‘civilized’ world. Technical measures often act to remedy a problem in an immediate locality at the expense of another region. Thus, sanitary plumbing systems may transport pathogenic wastes away from population centers, relieving the pressure of water-borne diseases in conurbations, but which nevertheless damage the more remote parts of the hydrologic cycle over the long term. The Soviet Union irrigated its agricultural regions at the expense of the Aral Sea, which is now a salt pan. And the United States has done the same through hydrological engineering, creating cities and farms in the desert. When the imbalances are too great, the inefficient parts consume too much energy. The Colorado River is drying up, triggering water restrictions. Through extinctions, the Gaian system restores balance by wiping out inefficiencies. Human systems may preserve and even amplify these inefficiencies by incentivizing them, yet even these economies and the bureaucracies which support them eventually collapse under their own weight. The result is the fall of civilization and empire, an inevitable, cyclical decline observed throughout human history. The Ancestral Puebloans, a budding, agricultural civilization in the same catchment as the Colorado River which is so heavily dammed today, collapsed in part due to protracted, exceptional drought, unsustainable farming practices and deforestation, some of the same conditions affecting the river’s drainage basin in recent times.

Whether the natural destruction is gradual (gradualism) or relatively sudden (catastrophism), whether it effects a few species or many, and whether more than one biome is affected, all depend on factors outside the scope of this book. Evolution abhors waste and will eventually deal with it, recycling its byproducts. Human systems, evolved from biological ones, cannot escape the same fate.

From a thermodynamic perspective, leaks in any complex system create inefficiencies. A civilization is a complex system, created by and composed of individuals with brains which are open, complex structures. These include brains organized into the many social groups which compose human societies, from markets, corporatist systems, trading networks, nations, and international organizations and alliances all the way to the smaller social networks found in tribes, clans, and nuclear and extended families. Membership in these political, religious, national and economic groups overlaps.

When a civilization becomes too large and cumbersome, the efficiencies once afforded by scale burgeon to such an extent that the economies of scale create inefficiencies. Greater and greater amounts of energy are needed to fuel these artificially created systems, which become too difficult to sustain. The inefficiencies are compounded and the system, may break down. Efficiency devolves to inefficiency.

From a purely physical standpoint, the organization of technological systems supporting and feeding civilization becomes overly centralized. The metabolization of energy becomes inefficient, creating more and more waste and useless or harmful byproduct, and the spillover into the Gaian system becomes intolerable to Gaia as a whole. In the past, fewer individuals in disparate parts of the globe allowed the Gaian system to absorb and recycle these waste products, at least over time. The price paid by the civilization which had accrued too many imbalances (most often ecological ones involving overpopulation, deforestation, soil erosion or nutrient depletion), was the extinction or devolution of that society. Yet now, the creation of a world-girdling civilization with over 7 billion inhabitants overwhelms the ability of the Terran system of systems to absorb and reprocess waste products. Deforestation, soil erosion, soil nutrient depletion and planetary overheating are leading to the prospect of a worldwide population crash.

These environmental imbalances are exacerbated by data processing, which produces more heat. As mentioned, this is an informational world built upon an industrial world established upon an agrarian one, and none of the earlier, cumulative imbalances created by the earlier artificial worlds has been addressed, since they each still exist because they are still needed. The world needs food, and finished goods, and, it appears, information networks and the data which these networks produce, transmit and store.  The hoped for efficiency of an Information Age economy simply offloads its heat energy into the system as a whole, resulting in planet-wide heat problems. A problem created by technology – overpopulation due to agricultural revolution, led to industrialization. Industrialization led to even further advances in agricultural production and to additional population growth. The excesses produced by industrialization were merely re-expressed as and in informationalization. Informationalization is, in some ways, a response to over-industrialization and overpopulation. Yet the solution, the creation of artificial information systems to manage systemic imbalance, simply creates more heat in attempting to rectify the imbalances created by industrial byproduct and consumptive lifestyle choices made by too many people. Computers cannot solve these problems. They are not endowed with wisdom, and they cannot come up with a solution to the problem of entropy or which violates the law of conservation of energy, since AI is a product of the same system which is subject to these laws. Systems tend toward disorder, and the total energy of such an isolated system as Gaia remains constant. No technology, including information technology, can provide the solutions which humans seek to these fundamental problems. The ultimate ecological reckoning may be postponed by AI, but not prevented. Our post-industrial economies threaten the survival of many species, including the single species they were engineered to serve.

The transhumanist movement termed technogaianism seeks to remedy these imbalances through the implementation of yet more technology. It is an ecological belief system which assumes that new technologies can rebalance the Gaian biosphere through the introduction of safe and clean energy. Yet whenever humans act to make something, they ultimately create disorder someplace else. Thermodynamic and conservation principles require this offset. This disorder may be expressed as noise, as waste heat, as refuse or as another form of pollution. This means that whenever humans act to create order in one place or in one form, it results in disorder somewhere else in some other form. The conservation laws and the laws of thermodynamics may be expressed more simply: there is no free lunch.