Earth’s Thought - a few notes

Earth is a single living creature, and that creature is self-aware.


I know that sounds insane but, sin é, there it is.


Did you ever have a moment when you thought about something familiar in a slightly different way? Suddenly a lot of things seem different. For me there was a moment when I was looking at a picture of a Wasp’s nest


A wasp’s nest is a complex structure, which wasps build with a paper like material. But when I said to myself ‘this is a wasp made structure’ the statement did not make sense. The way I have grown to see the world a wasp’s nest is natural, art of the natural world. If thinking about the ‘wasp made’ does not help us understand our world what about ‘man made’?


Fresh thought gave me fresh eyes. I started to think about how the natural world is shaped by creatures living together-grown like a coral reef. Our countryside, even the wild Burren, is shaped by farming. We are so proud of what we do that see our houses as different, special, not part of nature. Even when some wasp’s choose to build in the same location.


Seen with fresh eyes a spacecraft leaving Earth’s atmosphere is a thing of nature-a shell for soft skinned creatures to find more places to feed or live.


This brings so many questions. Why are creatures going there, and why so quickly? What does it mean for me, for all of us?


When you step out of the day-to-day world for a moment you can see there are answers.

Think about the idea for man to go to the moon. This idea was shared with the world in the story of the first fiction film in 1902. It became a physical reality less than seventy years later. In the history of the world seventy years is an astonishingly short time. Even if we date the idea to Jules Verne’s earlier book, about a hundred years, or the few thousand years since the ‘Tower of Babel’ was written of, it is an instant compared to the millions of years Earth has been inhabited.


And there you have it. Earth a living being thinking and acting. Ideas welling up in living creatures, who are driven to act.


That is the story I have to tell. Insane I know so I hope you will forgive me for thinking about it for a year or two before passing it on.