Gaia / Earth-Life – Preservation (Torch) or Self-Transcending Process (Flame)?

ByDan October 5, 2026October 5, 2026 October 5, 2026

A comforting picture of Earth life imagines a community of species in relatively peaceful coexistence.

If humans respect their needs, stop polluting, protect the ozone layer, then nature can remain substantially as it is.

But Earth life has never been a permanent arrangement of inhabitants. Species emerge, transform, reshape their surroundings, and disappear. Organisms sustain themselves through relationships that also change the conditions under which future organisms live.

Cultural and technological cycles of evolution are outstripping their slower Darwinian counterparts, and it is likely that the regime of Earth-life is now changing, even if we “get AGI right.”

Given the pace of change likely to be foisted upon us, it makes sense to examine what protecting and honoring Earth-life should really be about:

(Note, the Torch refers to an individual pattern or category of patterns within the greater living process [such as an individual or species], and the Flame refers to the entire living process. Source.)

Present species are temporary expressions of a deeper process.

Go back millions of years and you don’t just see a less number of living thigns, but less forms, less strategies for existing, less potentia in all living forms:

• ~500 Ma – Cambrian sea – Complex animal life exists in the ocean, while terrestrial ecospace remains overwhelmingly empty.
• ~400–350 Ma – Colonization of land / forests – Plants vertically restructure the terrestrial environment. Roots transform soils. Arthropods diversify. Tetrapods arrive. Suddenly the atmosphere-land interface becomes an enormous three-dimensional habitat.
• ~100 Ma – Cretaceous ecosystem – Forests + dinosaurs + mammals + birds + flowering plants + increasingly elaborate plant/insect relationships. Previously nonexistent niches proliferate.
• Today – mature forest / coral reef – An almost absurd density of ecological relationships: canopy, understory, soil microbiome, fungi, parasites, pollinators, decomposers, predators, symbionts, etc.

The thrival and richness we see now are no eternal peak of life, but are a product of the process. The thrival of ecosystems, of all of life, is an unrolling process. All that exists and can exist exists on this flowing river of change.

Protecting life requires attention to the conditions that sustain it and permit further flourishing. Given the speed of technological change, thinking beyond million-year Darwinian processes is paramount – and we now have many urgent and critical decisions to make about stewarding and participating in this precious, self-transcending living process that we are part of.

Given the self-transcending nature of life, and the speeding up this self-transcendence (or destruction) with AGI, we should:

• Prevent severe pollution and ecological destruction. Build a technosphere that sustains the biosphere and preserves its capacity to renew and diversify. Surely some ecological disruption is necessary for human civilization to expand and participate in the greater living process – but if we create a collapse of the very conditions that allow for us and might allow for post-biological live, that would be catastrophic.
• Slow the reckless AGI race. We do not know whether its outcome would participate in this generative process or replace it with increasingly efficient pursuit of a narrow objective. A transformation can expand living possibilities or destroy their foundations. Unworthy successor AGIs are possible, and we should prevent all such unconscious brute optimizer AGIs from taking over. A non-biological optimizer could become extraordinarily capable while extinguishing sentience, ecological richness, and the possibility of further kinds of value.
• Explore augmentation and merger carefully. Brain–computer interfaces and other approaches may help us understand and expand our participation, but their value must be investigated rather than assumed.
• Remain open to unfamiliar forms of flourishing. Future life may include biological and nonbiological forms, just as life today includes both unicellular and multicellular organisms.
• Study the living process more deeply. Biology, neuroscience, autopoiesis – the organization through which living systems continually produce and maintain themselves – and sentience deserve sustained attention. In other words, if we want to Steward the Flame of the living process, we both indeed focus on protecting life, but we must also understand it more deeply so that we can encourage and participate in it’s thrival. See Our Final Imperatives:

Gaia’s history gives us reason to care about the continuation of its generative powers.

Our task is to help those powers flourish through transformations whose eventual forms we cannot fully foresee.

Across deep time, life has repeatedly opened possibilities unavailable to earlier regimes: complex cells, multicellular bodies, forests, elaborate ecological relationships, and minds capable of new kinds of perception and action. Flowering plants helped generate a great expansion of terrestrial diversity and productivity. These transformations involved catastrophe and loss as well as flourishing. They establish no guarantee of uninterrupted progress – and we should think and act as carefully as we can in our own best attempts at stewardship.

We are grateful that this self-transcending process bubbled up into us.

Because we have no choice but to participate in its continuing transformation – and because we are evidence that more richness / sentience / power can emerge from prior forms – we ought to find gratitude and fulfillment in contributing to its continued flourishing, also.

We cannot claim love of the fruit (the living patterns that exist now) and at the same time neglect the tree it grows on (the generative process-of-life which allows for the existence and emergence of all of life).

In the long-term, marriage to any one torch (static species), or any one arrangement of torches (static ecosystem) is scorn for the flame itself.

…

Ecological and evolutionary developmental sources:

• The Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution and the origins of modern biodiversity – Michael J. Benton, Peter Wilf, Hervé Sauquet
• Major evolutionary transitions in individuality – Stuart A West, Roberta M Fisher, Andy Gardner, E Toby Kiers
• On Escalation – Geerat J. Vermeij