There’s a spectre haunting… no, no, I’m not going to talk about spectres or any kind of -isms. This is not a matter of religion. It is common sense, applied to available knowledge, and thinking on a larger scale than usual.

But to generate more of those warm, fuzzy feelings, following in the footsteps of James Lovelock, I’m going to call the Biosphere, “Gaia.”

Its hard to define what life is, but one thing all life has in common is that it endeavors to endure in time and expand in space. Gaia can be thought of as a super-organism and also has these characteristics. She has endured for 4 billion years and has expanded to every possible part of this planet. She is well called a biosphere because life does in fact form a sphere around the surface of the Earth.

But Gaia has not given up on expansion. Gaia still has the will, if you will, to expand more. But how? Other planets, of course, and that’s where humanity comes in.

We like to divide “natural” from “artificial,” as if humans were somehow outside of nature. Humans are part of Life and therefore everything they produce is part of Life. Why should we consider an anthill or a beaver dam “natural,” and a skyscraper “artificial?” Computers, airplanes, spaceships are products of the biosphere, being produced by a part of the biosphere (humans). Taken as a whole, technology is a part of life.

Even farsighted humans generally take an anthropocentric point of view, as in the Bible (Genesis 1:28), assuming that all of life is there for them, to serve their purposes. But actually it’s the other way around: humanity is an organ of Gaia.

Why did Gaia evolve this organ? Gaia spread all around the planet, by various means.  But in order to go to other planets, Gaia needed something different, something that never existed before: a kind of life that can develop and handle technology. Other life forms cannot escape the gravity well and cannot survive in vacuum or travel to other planets, cannot create habitats on other planets. Only a life form using technology can do so.

Gaia is ready to reproduce, to have babies, lay eggs as it were, but in order to do so it needed a new organ, and humanity is that organ, the womb of Gaia.

As Jesus said, “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off… if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out” (Mathew 18:8 & 9). If this organ, humanity, offends Gaia, then Gaia will probably not hesitate to pluck it out, or cut it off, as it were.

Gaia is fertile. She is ready. But what happens to a female organism when it is ready and doesn’t start a baby? That’s right, lots of blood, and a cleansing process occurs. And that’s what will happen to humanity if it doesn’t serve its function. It will get washed away and then in another five or ten million years or more, Gaia will evolve another species that perhaps will serve the function.

That’s not to say that humanity can’t also have its own agenda. But its agenda must be subordinate to the agenda of Gaia. Gaia needs to make babies and this is the time. Not to be pessimistic, it seems to be moving forward thanks to such visionaries as John F. Kennedy, John Polk Allen, Elon Musk…

Biosphere 2 marked the start of a new epoch, not just in the history of humanity but in the history of life itself. There have been many biospheres or to put it another way, the biosphere has changed many times in the course of its history (A. V. Lapo, “Traces of Bygone Biospheres”). We now live in a ethno- techno- biosphere-genic biosphere.

Elon Musk seems to be carrying the ball at this time, but he lacks the idea of biospheres. He keeps talking about putting human colonies on Mars. It’s not human colonies we need to put on Mars but biospheres. Even from an anthropocentric standpoint, humans won’t survive long on Mars without a fully functioning biosphere. But to give him the benefit of the doubt, he has stated that he intends to concentrate mainly on the transportation and preliminary infrastructure. He has only a very vague idea what the actual colonies will be like.

There’s about to be an explosion. But it’s nothing to be terrified about.

In geological time scales, life will expand rapidly away from this planet and from this solar system, in a geometric progression. From here life will move out to several other solar systems. Each of them will “seed” several more, and so on. Looked at from a galactic perspective and cosmic time scales, it will look like an explosion.

It may take a million years or so to really get going. Life is 4 billion years old, so a million years is pretty fast. A million years for all of life, scaled down to a human life, would be on the order of a week’s time.

It would be as if a human family were living in their house for fifty years and then, in a week, they populated the entire continent.

The Cosmic function of humanity, as part of the biosphere, is to birth new biospheres (biospherelets?) and expand the territory of life. From a cosmic viewpoint, everything else humans do is irrelevant. Of course, there’s no reason we can’t have fun along the way!

When humans build multiple biospheres to live in, what will we call the community of biospheres? How about “The Bioplex?”