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Every decade or so, another scientist says they’ve cracked how to eradicate mosquitos. An urge follows to know what, if any, a mosquito’s ecological use is within nature.

The feeling that arises is not one of pity, but comes out of a cold calculating look at what else we risk losing, exterminating a whole species – before we go ahead with our cruel experiment.

Through this intuition we uncover a serviceable, emotionally detached, definition for a meaning of life – what use a species serves in nature, for the greater good – our world’s survival.

Turning the cold eye back at us, we can use this idea to establish an objective meaning, if any, for human existence. This meaning moves beyond the existentialist idea that meaning is something the individual creates subjectively, in an otherwise nihilistic framework.

Man builds and destroys. For Mother Nature, then, we are either one of two things – an illness she’ll kill off with a slight fever in the sands of time, or, our building and destructive impulses are of some use.

Humans are artisan soldiers with a heightened imagination for threat. We build bigger, better tools, hone crafts and weapons in an effort to avert or instigate attacks. Using our ability of anxious foresight to anticipate greater, ever-evolving dangers, we cater to the uppermost heights of paranoid – often acting under the guise of “getting the Other, before they get us”. As a result, we appear in a perpetual state of imagined or active violence.

Threats vast enough to destroy earth, entirely, are still beyond our current capacities – even in the nuclear age. These include asteroids, or other such celestial bodies straying so close to our orbit, they risk obliterating the planet. Humanity’s civil wars, though still a risk – are not comparable to the threats that lie beyond the atmosphere.

A creature that can create an atomic bomb is by no means no mere trifle. But, to think us an unrectifiable mistake is not just to doubt a whole planet’s ecological ability to self-correct, it is to doubt the foundations of Darwinian evolution. It is to think us special, a staggering anomaly, so distinct from nature, we stand efface of it – rather than the inevitable by-product of biology.

Our insatiable need to build up bigger and stronger is, after all, a product of nature. Our perpetual growth, stirred by emotions of greed, and curiosity – are as ingrained in us as hunger. To think the human intellect as so out of step with earth, is to think us somehow above biology – rather than another link in the chain.

If our destructive creations are of use, if obliteration of the earth isn’t our scalable endpoint – our capacity to destroy, can just as readily be a protective mechanism. Art and culture have remained the outward expression of our interior lives since the first story told, and song sung. Throughout history our intellect and aggression, has grown exponentially in one creative direction. The most brutal periods of destruction lead inevitably to eras of mechanical progression – with every World War emerges a plethora of expansive technologies.

It seems a miracle we get to see stars in the night-sky in this briefest of epochs before all galaxies drift far beyond the horizon of the visible light. But, it is only possible to see stars as we live in a period of utmost celestial aggression. When all in the visible universe is close enough to be seen, it is close enough to interact. This time, as the universe expands outward, exponentially, is in the framework of the universe, a cosmic blink. Our fearful eyes, our aggressive impulses, then, a fitting sign of the times, an apt reflection of what’s out there, in us, here on earth.

To believe in miracles is to negate cause and effect. We see stars so we can know our place in peril, and build up a protective layer against the onslaught of cascading comets, consuming black holes and celestial aggressors.

If it was only the quiet life Mother Earth craved, she’d have settled for the biological perfection that is photosynthesis. Rather she implores chaos – violence, hunting-consumptive impulses, competition, and most damning of all, a reflective, self-correcting intellect. Passing the latter down can only stand to reason, our evils are of use.

To think otherwise, that a blemish such as us would skim past unnoticed, untouched – with such cataclysmic tendencies – is to think little of what we’ve come from, and even less of the difficulty of what is to exist as anything at all, and the ease of how quickly our place on this planet could be taken back. To be put here, is to be put to work. Whether we realise our duty, or fail in its coming about, doesn’t infer we are anything but a method put in place.

We are the biological byproduct of Earth’s attempt to self-persevere. Our aggression, our contempt, our humanity – necessary tools to at Her disposal. There’s no slight of hand, nothing beyond Her line of sight. Her hand’s at our back – our use determined, our potential, alone, to be seen.

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Written by Conor Kilkelly

Published 18/March/2023