Living rock: solstice reminds us that all species are related

I seized upon the oscillating universe model when I was at university nearly fifty years ago. 

The idea is controversial, although many scientists do believe that the universe operates in a perpetual cycle in which it expands, before contracting back in a ‘Big Crunch’ followed by a new Big Bang. [An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang, and can still be observed today, says Nobel winner] 

Living rock, like limestone just for instance, contains the stuff from which bone is grown. Dirt is alive, an amalgam of organisms living in community. The holy trinity is one oxygen and two hydrogen molecules. The Earth has a nucleus, a core generating untold power that creates a magnetic field not unlike our own bipolar bio-batteries driving our heartbeats and brain signals singing in B flat, the noise of the universe and has evolved the consciousness to remind even the fungi when to fruit. 

Some of us believe the Earth is consciously reacting to an infestation of humans.

First, we’d need to accept differential persistence – mere survival – as a legitimate form or mechanism of natural selection. Maybe it’s not possible for radioactive atoms to acquire stabilising mutations. And maybe it’s highly unlikely that whole biospheres, with multiple independent evolutionary lineages, could do so. But the latter is possible, and in biology we should be comfortable with this kind of reasoning. Let’s transpose this argument to Gaia. Gaia (the biological part of it, at least) is nothing more than the single clade of all living things descended from life’s last universal common ancestor (LUCA): we are all one big family of Joneses. [Is the Earth an organism? The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree] 

"Modern society" is a product of the forbidden fruit--agriculture. Cain, the farmer, slew Abel, the hunter-gatherer and, yes, humans' collective knowledge is pushing us home to the stars whose dust make us who we are. Reproduction is the reason, food is the fuel. Humans are merely Terran tools to go forth and find more...unless or until we kill it before it kills us for taking more than our share.