Page 71 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Ark Two

reproduced, giving its lifespan a definite and calculable terminus and
enabling populations to stabilize within their ecological niche by
making room for new generations with possibly essential mutations
by forced elimination of older ones; exactly in this way, claimed
Vosky, the entire transmitted system of planetary life might well
include the means to detect and destroy from within a failed
implementation.
If the entire ecosphere, held together synergistically by
interconnected functions, resembled an organism, personified by
Gaia, then its nemesis, the limits of stress to that system’s self-
perpetuation, resembled Atropos. The telomeres protecting the
planet through crises provoked by volcanic and meteoric activity, ice
ages and continental drift were, paradoxically, manifest as the
system’s increasing sensitivity to small environmental changes as it
aged and absorbed one trauma after another. The process analogous
to degenerative disease, autoimmunity and concomitant inflammation
weakening telomeres in an organism would be, under Vosky’s
extraterrestrial life-map, the accumulation of synthetic chemicals and
radioactive elements created only by a sophisticated species gone
terribly wrong—us. The natural world would have no means of
recovering from the assault through the passage of time alone, as it
had in past “natural” disruptions of its health; its recuperative
capacity would decline rapidly and life-support dwindle and
disappear.
Vosky claimed that his theory was just as valid, if not more so,
than the random wandering DNA of panspermia—and, by extension,
all origin hypotheses, whether proposed by scientists or theologians.
Further, by requiring intelligence vastly superior to our own, it was
not simply a projection of our own rudimentary abilities. In short,
only a scientific enterprise in a civilization which had avoided the fate
for which we now appeared headed could have created a planetary
blueprint; realizing the likelihood of any resultant sapient creatures
becoming a risk to the rest of the cosmos, they added conditional
mortality to the entire apparatus: if that unpredictably creative species
were unable to regulate itself, to live within its means in the
evolutionary niche of an entire planet, then it would have to be
terminated, and the means of doing so were the ends of its own
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