It must be something in the air at the moment (gee, I wonder what it could be?) but recently I've found my thoughts wandering from exoplanets and life's origins to rather more parochial concerns. Actually, that's not entirely accurate, because a lot of those concerns are actually intimately linked with our understanding of the nature of planetary environments, biospheres, and the probability of life elsewhere.
The more we learn about the history of our own world, and the wider solar system, the more we see how both minor and major events in one era can cascade into radical changes in another. Contingency beats at the heart of many things; from planetary orbits to the present nature of life on Earth.
Frighteningly, we're no less vulnerable to any of these variable trajectories than any other species. Yet we do have, to some degree, a capacity to modify our choices and actions that has perhaps not been present in any other set of organisms in the 4-billion-year history of life on this cosmically small crumb of frozen minerals.
Our problem seems to be an inability to turn inaction into action, to stay focused and on task as a collective of hominids. It appears that we need constant reminding and nudging.
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