Why your descendants won’t be researching you from their home on Proxima Centauri B

Since I first borrowed A for Andromeda  from Castlerea public library in 1964, I’ve been a regular reader of science fiction. It provides escape and reassurance in equal measure,  distorting the present in safe but stimulating ways, projecting well-worn history onto future landscapes. Space opera, á la Star Trek, is especially good at this.

Make it so.

But one aspect of genealogy has made it increasingly difficult for me to suspend the disbelief needed to keep space opera readable. As DNA studies expand knowledge of our deep ancestry, it has become crystal clear how interrelated we all are. And by “we” I don’t just mean human beings. We’re descended from the same original microbe as every living thing on earth. Those trees are your umpteenth cousins, umpteen times removed. The bacteria in your intestines helping to digest your food are more distant maybe, but still part of the family, still harking back to gtn-gt-granddaddy, the Methesulah microbe.

You want a real family tree? We’re Eukaryotes

The point is that we’re not just related, our existences are utterly intertwined. We have spent 2.8 billion years co-evolving, depending on the peculiar seasonality of this planet, on the slow accumulation of soil, knotting ever-deeper symbiotic links between living things.

Not known for its exploration of outer space

Human dependence on Earth is total. Our immune systems, our brains, our muscles all rely for their day-to-day existence on the intermeshed family trees that comprise life on the planet. To think about extracting one element of this whole, human beings, and throwing them through space to other planets is utterly absurd. It makes as much sense as sending a steak and kidney pie to the moon and expecting it to set up a colony.

That’s why I can’t watch Captain Picard any more. And that’s why your descendants won’t be researching you from their home on Proxima Centauri B.

8 thoughts on “Why your descendants won’t be researching you from their home on Proxima Centauri B”

  1. And why the possibility of a sixth great extinction is not only real but so very frightening. Thanks for a very interesting article.

    1. It also serves us notice that we are likely never to be threatened by any intelligent life that exists elsewhere. The resources here support our lifeforms and probably wouldn’t be attractive to Centaurians and others. Let’s hope so anyway. They can send an e-mail but no reason to meet the neighbors esp. if they eat hominids.

  2. As a species, animal or plant kingdom, we’ve inherited a solar system and planet within it capable of providing for all our needs: air, water, food and shelter, and yet we remain so obsessed with our intellectual superiority that we continue to destroy that which sustains us.

    Thank you for an excellent, well-thought column, John.

  3. Ha! Sorry, I still go with Capt Picard. That’s why they wear those invisible space suits. Keeps them safe in “home” environment. hee hee. And why they are always “terraforming” where ever they go. Is interesting to speculate on what happens when Earth bacteria and Proxima bacteria meet. Lots of B movies have derived from that scenario. And can Earthlings and Proximarians interbreed? Whoo, lots of Japanese anime derived from that!! Don’t count good Capt out yet! Leave room for imagination and mind stretching. hahaha. Happy New Year.

  4. If I remember it correctly, in Star Trek: TheNext Generation, there was an episode where it was revealed that Humans, Romulans, Klingons and the rest had ALL been seeded by a predecessor race of beings. I don’t think that’s likely, but your diagram is amazing. We and the rest of the larger animals (dinosaurs to apes and us) come from the Eukaryotes, so an even larger family tree is needed!

  5. Having just been introduced to Dolores Cannon and her publications, our ancestry goes back further than microbes. The seeding of our planet Earth was a totally new concept introduced via her subjects former and current life regressions.
    Michael and Moira might be interested in reading some of her publications….I am stretching my mind not to just dismiss her ‘research’ as I am open to the power of the Universe’s energy and how we are destroying our planet by our behaviour.

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