there is a deep meaning to bumblebee baseball. yes, i’m going to go on about the bees again. carpenter bees will literally eat your wooden building down around you – there’s sawdust falling like snow in my shed. they’re worse than termites, and that means that the human race is going to wage war against the species. bumblebee baseball is an alternative: domestication. so long as people enjoy the activity, they have a reason to keep the bees around. my father tried to poison them, and it had no effect at all – i saw no dead bees, but after an hour of exercise, the ground is littered with them. if you actually want to control the numbers, you have to hit the females, but you must leave some. these insects would not have these nests and exist in such numbers if it weren’t for humans, so we make a bargain with them. some of you can use our wood, and prosper, and we get to swat the excess. i believe in ahimsa, non-harming, to my core, but i’m also an ecologist, and this is managing the garden.
evolution isn’t as most people see it, red in tooth and claw. there are layers upon layers of mutualism that make that tiger possible. the chloroplasts in plants and the mitochondria in our cells are mutualistic symbionts. flowering plants and their pollinators dominate the land along with forests and their mycorhizzae, and corals and their symbiotic algaes take a bit part of the oceans. the last major group of symbionts is us: humans and our partner plants and animals. evolutionary biology recognizes another form of evolution outside of genetics, cultural evolution, part of dual inheritance theory. the neolithic age and the green revolution are about this technology. we are now going through a new phase of domestication, with such as the dozens of tropical fish species and hundreds of exotic house plants. there are also peridomesticates, like songbirds that raise an extra brood each year in urban areas, from feeders and urban heat runoff as new species take their part in our collective.
biotechnology is the feedback cycle between information, industrial and agricultural revolutions. cultural evolution and genetic evolution are linked. now, i’m not saying that this is going to go well for our current civilization, but it does herald a new phase of our evolution. thus teilhard de chardin, the jesuit palaeontologist with his ideas of evolution towards godhead. i’ve read that some of his ideas have been tested and shown to be false, but the tests where not all they could be, and in any case, it’s the kind of thing we make true. we could domesticate every species (left) on the planet, make the world our garden. now, among ecologist, this is a touchy idea – many people want large areas of wilderness left alone, which i fully support, but the truth is that those ecosystem are already structured by human impacts and to be complete hands off is irresponsible.
this is the nutty part – if, somehow, we manage to manage our world, then it becomes (and i hate this word) our destiny to spread life to the dead worlds. by then, humanity *is* life on earth and we have the means to take that life elsewhere. we will grow cacti and lichens on mars, plankton in the seas of europa, who knows? living Zeppelins in the atmosphere of jupiter, all of which are children of earth. so, the man on mars thing – no. that’s a publicity stunt and useless. send a dozen robots for half the cost, learn automation and robotics. we lack the technology to build stable closed ecosystems – we can’t even do it here, in the desert. we need a self-sufficient science colony here on earth, in oh, say, Antarctica, somewhere with geothermal heat and ore. we build the best station the world can build, geared toward self-sufficiency. send 500 highly trained people and thereafter they get one shipment of stuff a year, within limits and otherwise have only information contact.the colony is not allowed to hunt, fish or otherwise interact with the local ecosystem. hell, pay for it with reality television, people would be fascinated. that’s the technology we need, and it would probably cost less than the man on mars nonsense.
I'd love to have a freezer full of great local trout, I'd eat fish a lot more often if it wasn't way more expensive.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
