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There's no cosmic benefit to life existing on Earth, or at all. Well, maybe and only if you take the position that all life and/or suffering are irrelevant on

There's no cosmic benefit to life existing on Earth, or at all. Well, maybe and only if you take the position that all life and/or suffering are irrelevant on a cosmic scale. If they are not irrelevant, then we can't know if there's any benefit to our continued existence. Will lessons that we learn here on this planet one day be used to alleviate the suffering of other sentient beings on another? We don't know but if that happens, I would argue that it was a benefit of us having lived.

logfromblammo 10y ago
I don't care about whether the rest of the universe benefits from Earth life or not. Earth life benefits from Earth life. And I'm part of the Earth life complex. So as a planet, we're going to construct durable spores and spray them out into the cosmos until that capability is destroyed. Then those spores will eventually contact other celestial bodies and activate as much Earth life as is possible in the environmental conditions there. That life will spread and evolve, possibly far enough to make its own durable spores in the future. Thus, life will eventually spread to every available niche in the galaxy. We do not know whether Earth life originated on Earth or from some other planet's probe, and it really doesn't matter. We still have to build the ships and launch them, or the information amassed by the millions of years of evolving Earth life will be lost with the destruction of Earth. That's nothing to the rest of the universe. But it's everything to us. My legacy as an individual organism is to reproduce fertile offspring. That's the biological imperative. If you never had grandchildren, you never really mattered to the current state of the planet. So what is that on a planet-wide scale? If you never build an offworld colony that will go on to build an offworld colony, nothing your planet did will ever matter.

logfromblammo 10y ago

I don't care about whether the rest of the universe benefits from Earth life or not. Earth life benefits from Earth life. And I'm part of the Earth life complex. So as a planet, we're going to construct durable spores and spray them out into the cosmos until that capability is destroyed. Then those spores will eventually contact other celestial bodies and activate as much Earth life as is possible in the environmental conditions there. That life will spread and evolve, possibly far enough to make its own durable spores in the future. Thus, life will eventually spread to every available niche in the galaxy. We do not know whether Earth life originated on Earth or from some other planet's probe, and it really doesn't matter. We still have to build the ships and launch them, or the information amassed by the millions of years of evolving Earth life will be lost with the destruction of Earth. That's nothing to the rest of the universe. But it's everything to us. My legacy as an individual organism is to reproduce fertile offspring. That's the biological imperative. If you never had grandchildren, you never really mattered to the current state of the planet. So what is that on a planet-wide scale? If you never build an offworld colony that will go on to build an offworld colony, nothing your planet did will ever matter.