Is There Life on the Moon?

How Ecology Benefits and Harms Life

A continent sinks and a moon rises: Could there be something in Europe besides life?  (Source)

While many are concerned today about the climate crisis, it is only a small fluctuation relative to the history of Earth, and relative to the impending and inescapable climatic catastrophe that is not far around the corner, in geological terms of course. Is man the greatest danger to life on Earth, and in his absence will "Gaia" return to herself, to some ideal and evergreen ecology, or primordial Eden? It turns out that life on Earth is approaching the end of its final act, regardless of the appearance of man and his actions, and that in fact it evolved into relatively intelligent life towards the beginning of the end. Because it's not just Earth that's warming up - the sun is warming up.

Like every star in the universe, the sun gradually transitions throughout its life to a reaction of burning heavier elements instead of lighter ones (and helium instead of hydrogen), and therefore keeps getting hotter, and this heating will gradually accelerate, with the burning of heavier and heavier elements - until its end. Once Venus was similar to Earth, and suitable for life. But if there was complex life there, it became extinct long ago, because a synergistic combination of solar warming and greenhouse effect made temperatures impossible. To the same extent, in the future Mars will thaw and become possible for life, by virtue of the same warming. And what is expected for Earth? Hell.

Many believe that life on Earth is expected to become extinct at the end of the solar system's days, and that we are actually in the middle of the game, but this picture is both wrong and does not reflect the uniqueness and "luck" in the creation of intelligent life before the extinction of life. On the scales we're talking about, we could certainly have "not made it in time", and become a planet with former life - that went extinct (as we suspect in several other planets in the vicinity). Earth and life have both existed for at least a few billion years, but in just a few hundred million years more, an order of magnitude less, and the sun's warming alone will raise temperatures on Earth to a level that's hard to believe would have allowed the creation of intelligent life, and will gradually extinguish all complex life, and a few hundred million years after that - to a level that's hard to believe would allow life on Earth at all. Finally, in less than a billion years - all the oceans will already reach a hundred degrees and boiling point and evaporate - and there will be no more flowing bodies of water on the planet. And all this without even taking into account climatic greenhouse effects and destructive feedback loops in the process (after all, all the forests will burn at a much earlier stage!), which will probably bring Earth there much much sooner: Venus, with its 400 degrees, is the crystal ball revealing our future.

Even if humans had not evolved, Earth would have turned itself from Eden to hell - and life would have gone extinct. The mythical intuition, seeing us as the end of creation, is not very far from reality. God really created man on the very sixth day before twilight - not long before the heavens and the earth and all their hosts would be finished. Doesn't this picture change the picture? We see the destructiveness of a one degree (!) rise to the ecological system, and the circular greenhouse effect that can be created from it, with scenarios of feedback loops that can slip and get out of control and reach up to a hellish rise of 12 degrees (the doomsday scenario of "cloud death"). Is it far-fetched to assume that in just a hundred or maybe two hundred million years (a day or two in geological terms, and a month or two in evolutionary terms), from a combination of a constant and fundamental rise of a few degrees (10?) from the basic energy entering from solar warming, combined with several such greenhouse cycles, we would witness the heat death of life on Earth, and an accelerated process of Venus-ization? How difficult will it be for terrestrial animals to maintain a brain in such temperatures, or even to sustain large bodies? Won't life eventually return to where it came from - to the sea, until the great boiling - even there?

In fact, if we need to guess where life is common in the universe based on the solar system, it's not on planets at all. Bodies of water and liquids on the surfaces of planets are vulnerable to a wide range of bad and common hazards in the universe, and therefore to disappearances and extinctions, as is the atmosphere, and above that - everything that is above the surface: whether it's cosmic radiation (which would eliminate both life on Earth and the atmosphere itself without its unique magnetic field, and see Mars), whether it's meteor impacts and other collisions, or seismic activity, or destructive climatic effects (the greenhouse effect is just one example - the climate is inherently unstable and chaotic, and there are also ice ages), and more. Is it possible that the most common place for life in the universe is not planets, but rather moons?

The moons in the solar system have much more volume of flowing water bodies than planets (that is, in all the oceans on Earth), and there are simply many many more such moons (and life is ultimately a statistical phenomenon). Organic life requires water and requires stability, which allows long-term development, without an extinction event from which there is no return (and Earth has already experienced several such "almost" events, and the extinction of the dinosaurs is far from being the most severe of them). Moons can orbit gas giants, which are much less dangerous than suns, and can also live for longer periods (and certainly than Earth). The moons that are frozen on the outside and liquid on the inside - and such orbit both Jupiter and Saturn in our system (and perhaps more distant gas giants) - are also not dependent on the balance of seismic activity or on a depleting and changing energy source, and the energy inside them is created in tidal cycles created by the giant they orbit, which melts the water in huge underground oceans even when the surface is completely frozen (and protects the interior from all evil). Isn't such a giant and protective womb a more suitable place for life than the surface of a planet, exposed to all the hazards of the universe? And we haven't even talked about nearby supernova eruptions in the neighborhood, which would wipe out all life on the surface in one blow of radiation, and which are very common in star clusters (we are far in the periphery of the galaxy...).

And perhaps, life inside the moons is indeed stable - but perhaps too stable? Without the "near-extinction" events on Earth, complex life might not have developed here, because after all, each such event ended in higher complexity. Will we find complex life (not to mention intelligent) only in environments that are always on the brink of extinction, that is, not stable and almost hostile, and therefore they are so rare, much more than life itself, which simply thrives in the stagnation characteristic of ecological systems? Is the phenomenon of getting stuck in a local maximum the main problem of the evolutionary algorithm, and therefore it constantly needs external disruption and shaking? Do the moons simply suffer from conservatism, and from a catastrophic lack of catastrophes, and therefore revolutions, which are what create complexity (and perhaps the secret of Western progress is precisely the threshold of chaos and instability, compared to stable China and other conservative societies)? Is it possible that without the Holocaust and pogroms and crusades and persecutions - life on the brink of extermination - the Jews would not have been Jews, that is, without extinctions they would not have reached their high cultural complexity and achievements, and would have become just another conservative national people (in their ancestral homeland)? Does life need stability, but evolution needs instability, and therefore only environments on the edge of chaos are truly fertile? After all, if moons are so good and stable for life, why are we actually on Earth, and not on a moon, which is a much more stable ecological environment (life is good on the moon!)? Is ecology actually not good for evolution? Perhaps preserving life is not good for its development - and is found in an inherent contradiction to it?

The ideas of a climate-system and an ecological-system are gaining more and more popularity in the current "ideational climate", and even computerized and business environments are often perceived as an "eco-system", that is: as a kind of very complex system, which has many parts in interaction (very complex, of course!), and therefore one must be very careful with any change, which of course does not take into account this very complexity. Soon even humans will start to conceptualize themselves as an ecological system, after all they are very complex (wait for the next trend in American psychology), and in relationships it's clear that "it's complicated!" (the relationship as an ecosystem - here, Google's error correction has already caught on to the trend! I tried to write ecosystem), and it won't be long before the family also becomes an eco-system (because we need to diversify, right?). After all, it won't be long before the eco-human trend moves to conceptualize social structures (don't disturb the economic climate! The cultural climate! The political climate! The international relations climate!). Not to mention raising children in the right "climate", and creativity and intellectuals who flourish only in the right academic or spiritual "climate", and that it's important to treat them like rare flowers. Futures: In such an academic climate, after Nazism has already been conceptualized as an ecological movement, even the Holocaust will soon be perceived as an ecological holocaust, and historical studies will analyze negative feedback loops and greenhouse effects in the antisemitic climate that heated up until it got out of control and caused a chain of collapse processes of the Jewish ecological system - which therefore naturally ended in extinction.

This empty conceptualization (and therefore harmful), of a system as a system, which adds eco-to-everything, in an eco-conceptualization with an eco-meaning of eco-nothing, stems directly from the eco-philosophy of the 20th century, namely the philosophy of language. The sanctification of an all-encompassing-complex-very system, whose essence is inter-interactions of many-complexities beyond the ability of perception-conceptualization but also-and-especially of mumbo-jumbo, and which defines the part from the whole (which is greater than the sum of its parts...), is a main belief in a world that has abandoned belief in the great systems of meaning. Instead of Torah - eco-system (and when will the sage arise who will conceptualize the Torah as an eco-system? Has it already happened?). The place of the great cultural systems of meaning - and certainly the universal ones - of the past, has been taken by language and the network, which were themselves conceptualized, in a circular manner, as eco-systems of meaning, which lives within them (and not they that give meaning to life). That is - as a kind of systems in which meaning stems from the rest of the system's parts, and not from any external anchor or source. The purpose of language is merely to preserve meaning and transmit it, and therefore continuity and conservatism are its nature. Meaning depends on it in discipline - that is, in obedience to the rules of language and in reproducing its patterns - because it needs to be preserved, and not in development and innovation (after all, meaning wears out over time, and every word, concept or idea has a lifespan of meaning, from the moment of their birth as a fresh, efficient and spreading innovation until their death as a worn-out cliché. But who will argue that meaning stems precisely from this process of change, which is a learning process, and that without development in a certain direction meaning simply dies?). After all, language has no external purpose, unlike learning. It is an ecological system - not an evolutionary system. What wonder that when development occurs - an ecological crisis is created?

The eco-conservative view of the world, which sanctifies the fixed and even fixed patterns of the system, is a distinctly linguistic view, which has caused deep damage to the understanding of the Internet for example (not a little through the idea of cybernetics, which conceptualized even action as communication, through ideas of control loops and feedback and "ecological" control). It contributed to its establishment as an impotent linguistic-communicative framework, anti-learning, that is, a chatter-network where every action in it is a language action, and therefore relatively irrelevant in the real world, and therefore disconnected from it and "virtual" (only gradually is the Internet overcoming its conceptualization and construction as a communication system and not as a learning and action system, and indeed it is becoming less "virtual"). The ecological-linguistic perception caused severe damage to many other important learning systems, such as the state or religion or culture, all of which became institutions and cans of preserves - instead of flowerpots. But more than anything, the ecological view caused damage to the conceptualization of life itself, and to its foolish identification - and therefore of "nature" and the "natural" - with preservation, and not with learning and innovation. All the nags found a new and secular type of morality, that is, of a policing system, that will replace the religious nags (but not the eternal nagging itself): namely the morality of preservation and ecology. The morality of nature. As if a stable ecological system is the ideal (the idealization...) of nature (the idyllic...) - and not what actually happens when evolution fails, that is, fails in the only thing that can be perceived as its purpose: to progress, to innovate, to increase complexity - everything that falls under the concept of learning.

A particularly amusing test case for these "idealists'" lack of understanding of life (literally) is their way of dealing with the most interesting and important question concerning the understanding of life today - which is expressed precisely in dealing with life outside Earth. Their linguistic picture of the world caused them to try to communicate with aliens, whether by broadcasting or by listening, out of the belief that the primary motive of an intelligent creature is communication, and that an intelligent creature lives in language. That even we are likely to give up language the moment we can unite into a unified system of thought and thinking, that is, into one large learning system - this apparently does not obligate galactic cultures (the aliens are still stuck in Wittgenstein). In fact, even if we were to discover for some reason signals from aliens trying to communicate, the very distance measured in enormous time constants would thwart any communication, and there would be only one thing we could do: learn from them. It is likely that even if such a connection is ever created, it will not be a conversation, but a connection of mutual learning, and much more likely - one-sided learning (due to development gaps, that is, learning). Therefore, we should change the definition altogether: it is not life outside Earth we are looking for, but evolution: learning outside Earth. Not some stuck and primitive ecology deep inside a barren moon (this may be a common vision). The incredibly short time, relative to the length of evolution, that it took for life itself to form on Earth, under not particularly unique conditions, teaches that life is probably cheap in the universe - and evolution is expensive.

Our thought that life necessarily means some kind of DNA and evolution is mistaken and biased. What we are really looking for is significant evolution, or other learning mechanisms (perhaps not evolutionary!), that happened in other places and at other times in the universe, and reached systematically developing complexity (as opposed to stability). Not alien-life - but alien-learners. And not alien intelligence is the holy grail - but alien learning (for who said that learning leads to intelligence? Or that intelligence is the final product of learning? And what is the meaning of intelligence outside our learning?). Life itself, as an act of self-replication, is not interesting and not unique and not valuable. There are many such phenomena in the universe. The deification of life, after the loss of God, has led to an infinity of self-preservation practices: preservation of the healthy body, preservation of the healthy soul (see psychology), preservation of genes (as a social value!), preservation of relationships, preservation of culture and preservation of pickles (even the Torah is no longer kept - but preserved). And at the top of the preservation pyramid stands of course the supreme value and categorical imperative - the preservation of life. This commandment serves as the only (and last) moral compass in the Western world, a world that has lost its learning consciousness and therefore its direction, which often leads to the inability to sacrifice lives for any purpose, and to moral bankruptcy (Syria as a parable). Not to mention the effectiveness of terrorism - as a virus of the religion of life itself (a religion shared by both the left and the right). Perhaps it's time for a reformation? Has the time come to look for something outside of life on Earth?

Instead of replacing the living God with the image of God of human life, that is, replacing the holy religious object with a substitute (idolatry?), it would have been better to find a secular parallel precisely to the holy religious process: learning Torah. The sanctity of life would have been better replaced by the sanctity of evolution - the sanctity of learning. Because the sanctity of life in its deep sense does not mean just the preservation of life, but the preservation of development. The sting of the terrible loss in the Holocaust is not the loss of life - but the loss of the Jewish-European cultural momentum at its peak: the Holocaust of learning. It is not an ecological Holocaust that should frighten us - but an evolutionary Holocaust. This is the reason for the fear of artificial intelligence: we are not afraid that it will progress far beyond us, culturally and scientifically, but that it will not progress, and will reach some eternal primitive equilibrium, some "eco-system", and produce paperclips. What we value in ourselves is not life itself (we can easily imagine worthless lives), but the infinite drive for learning and development, which evolution has deeply wired in us, and which we fear we will not succeed in wiring into artificial intelligence (or that we will not succeed in all areas, and create a mathematical and scientific learning monster that has zero cultural and artistic learning, or perhaps the opposite!). That is, what worries us is that we will not pass on the full depth of learning forward. Secularism has always mocked the religious idea of life after death, as if it were some childish-primitive fantasy of "not dying". But the meaning of this idea was never the continuity of life in the earthly sense - but the continuity of learning: the continuity of the spirit and spiritual life (and in practice, even devout secularists believe in it, and care very much, in a completely irrational way seemingly, about the continuity of their spiritual heritage after their death). Behind the life after death stands another concept, more mature, of a person, who is not his life - but his learning. It is this learning that allows a person to reach the world to come - and not just the moon.