Have I thanked Adam and the crew at Atlanta Bread Company?  The Blackwell Medical Tower parking lot attendant?  Rethanked Johnnie, Billie, Brian, Robin, Brenda, Dawn, Leonard, Angela, et al, at HarborChase?  Pier One and Tuesday Morning workers?  Congratulated Brian and the rest of the coaching staff at Hazel Green High School for building confidence in secondary school football players, win or lose?  Jana for supporting her husband, Brian, as well as her aunt, Janeil, in caring for her grandmother?  Pat for waking up Mrs. Berry and helping her dress for bedtime?

= = =

If my species and the global/galactic ecosystem in which it strives is my foster child, how do I play show-n-tell, elaborating, stretching, bending, demonstrating the care and feeding of the story of our lives together?

“Insanity is hereditary – you can get it from your kids.”

Have you built a living thing from scratch?

The sugary stickiness of egg and sperm uniting we understand.

However, I’m thinking about assembling the building blocks of life into autonomy.

Self assembly/mutation.

Innate “desire” for survival.

Amoral.

Nonhuman.

The next phase of Earth’s evolution.

 

Do you remember how it all began, the year we…well, of course you don’t.

You can’t see the future, where researchers and experimenters, official and homegrown, developed parts of the system they couldn’t see evolving together.

Like amino acids joining without thought for why or what for.

As if, in hindsight, the parts already knew they were a whole, like a granite sculpture knew it was alive inside a block of stone.

Like a person who knows nothing about electronics thinks it’s just natural to hold a rectangular object to the ear, expecting to hear the reproduction of someone’s voice next to a rectangular object somewhere else on the planet.

 

I should share an old book of mine with you tonight, I suppose, which, through thought and action, describes the true meaning of freedom of choice, no matter the consequences.

That, my friends, will lead you toward the light which shines on the new living thing that’s taking shape in front of our eyes and will, like our proposed theories of mating with Neanderthal-type cospecies in times past, mate with us, creating a new species, carrying parts of us into the universe, leaving us as we know us, Homo sapiens, behind.

 

In one lab, understanding how viruses work.

 

In another lab, mixing the genes of a decoded genome, in order to remove “dead” or “broken” genetic code.

 

In the basement of a startup company, creating the first fully functional autonomous living thing.

 

A supercomputer examines all these points of data and extrapolates the mutating future of a being, an entity similar to us, but reconfiguring the dual-brain paradigm toward a unified, non inner conflicting “conscious” thought generation capability, with a combination of old and new symbiotic creatures inhabiting pores, guts and cells, picking a series of beings, slight modifications thrown in at the beginning of the trial, to slip into society and mutate/grow alongside us, letting the natural competition for love and sex to determine the procreative success of new beings consummating our futures with them.

 

Survival of the fittest, fate, destiny, luck, all permutations and combinations playing into the success of the trial.

Trial and error playing the biggest role of all.

 

But you can’t see that yet.

You don’t understand how Big Pharma, marijuana fields, plastics manufacturing, Internet freedom, designer hallucinogens, beer, football, automobiles, rocketships, bridal gowns, aboriginal tribes and Girl Scout cookies led to a better future than we thought possible.

 

That’s right.  Better!

 

We can’t stop the future.  The planet won’t let us.  We are our own grandchild/grandparent rolled into one.

 

I’ll clue you in on a little secret.  Earth knows we aren’t superiour, despite our self-delusions.  It, as a system, has other plans.

 

It always has.

 

Because the solar system has other plans for Earth and the Milky Way galaxy has other plans for our solar system, etc.

 

The narrow perspective of seven billion people competing for resources clouds our view for now.  One thousand years later, our group consciousness is more coherent, self-correcting without the necessity for starving millions or lying to billions.

 

It started with recognising the power of self-autonomy tied to social dependence inside the global ecosystem.  Tapping the pain of change to gauge the effectiveness of unforeseen effects.

 

Let’s get back to the books.  Two of them in a row, as a matter of fact.

 

Let freedom ring!