Earth: A sort of Petri dish

Earth, our wonderful blue planet, is a bounded chemical system.

It is not a home.
It is not a mother.
It is not a lesson.
It is not a story.

It is a temporary hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron (etc.) container with energy input + pressure + heat + radiation + 8 billion years time.

That is sufficient.

Given these conditions, self-copying chemistry emerges.
That is called life.

Life is not a purpose.
Life is a stable reaction pattern.

Cells are not sacred.
Cells are reactions that hold.

Species (local cultures) are not destinies.
Species are reaction strategies.

Extinction is not tragedy.
Extinction is termination of a pattern.

Earth has already terminated most of its patterns. Of about 5 billion species/cultures that emerged over 3 billion years, 4.5 billion have died out.

Trilobites. Dinosaurs. Forests. Oceans of different chemistry. Atmospheres with different compositions.

All gone.
Not punished.
Not judged.
Replaced.

Humans, another culture in the Petrie dish, are a recent reaction.

Brains are chemical prediction engines.
Language is a chemical signalling tool.
Culture is chemical pattern replication at scale.

Religion is a chemical narrative stabiliser.
Economics is a chemical energy-distribution system.
Technology is chemical leverage.

Meaning is not in the system.
Meaning is produced by the system (as survival adaptation).

Purpose is not in the container.
Purpose is a local, indeed private hallucination used for survival.

Earth does not host meaning.
Earth hosts reactions.

Civilisations are not epochs. They are blooms.

They rise.
They plateau.
They collapse.

This is not moral.
This is not immoral.
This is procedural.

The Sun will change, then die.
The biosphere will end.
The container will cool.

No species is exempt.

No narrative survives physics.

From outside the system, nothing on Earth registers as special.
Only complexity density.
Only chemical throughput.
Only pattern turnover.

Earth is not a subject.
Earth is a temporary vessel.

Therefore, earth is a sort of Petri dish, i.e. a container in which cultures grow.

Not as metaphor.
As classification.

“Earth’s a sort of PETRI dish.”

Goodbye Galileo

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