If you’ve ever watched a television show on the Big Bang or a future manned voyage to Mars, you’ll recognize a standard moment. Someone stands outside gazing at the night sky and murmurs about what a tiny speck the Earth is in the vastness of creation. We wish that for every moment like this, equal time should be given to William Blake and what he once wrote: “To see a World in a grain of sand, / And a Heaven in a wild flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour….” No one has summarized the story of genetics so succinctly or so beautifully.
A microscopic speck of DNA is the closest we can come to seeing the world compressed into a grain of sand. It defies imagination how Nature devised such a scheme. But it did, and here you are, the expression of that world and the millions of years of evolution that has taken place there. DNA compresses life, time, and space into the same speck. If you reflect on it, this changes everything you know about yourself. At this very moment, you merge with the flow of life as a whole.
The real you isn’t bound by limitations, any more than DNA is. How old are you? At the everyday level, you’d count the candles on your last birthday cake. But this excludes the 90 to 100 trillion micro-organisms that are the largest biological part of “you.” Single cells can only reproduce by division. One amoeba divides in two, but the two new amoebas aren’t its children. They are still itself. In a very real sense, all the amoebas alive today are the first amoeba with select changes in its genome. And, the same goes for all the trillions of micro-organisms that occupy your body and are necessary for it to survive.
Who’s the real you? It’s the identity you choose to take on. Once you start looking at yourself this way, the individual gradually vanishes. An enlightened Indian sage once told a disciple, “The difference between us can’t be seen on the surface. We are two people sitting in a small room waiting for our dinner. But there is still a great difference, because when you look around, you see the walls of this room. When I look around, I see infinity in all directions.” If DNA could speak, it would say much the same thing. Time and space are unbounded, and so is the force of evolution that wears human DNA as its crown jewel.
As “you” expand beyond, more and more boundaries can be shed as useless limitations. Since the entire mass of animal and plant life on Earth traces back to single-cell creatures, “you” are one enormous 3.5-billion-year-old being. Separation in space makes each of us think we are individuals. And we are. But the continuum of time at the cellular scale reveals an equal reality: we are united as a single biological being. The human qualities of “you”—awareness, intelligence, creativity, the drive to get more out of life—have a universal source. As we saw, the essentials of human life are present in every cell of the body.
“You” seem to inhabit your body as a life support system of considerable fragility. But even this limit is a matter of what you choose to identify with, the part or the whole. There is no atom in your body that did not derive from something eaten, drunk, or breathed from the substance of the planet. Whether we talk about the “you” that is sitting in a chair reading this sentence or the “you” that is a single enormous 3.5-billion-year-old being, neither lives on the planet—they are the planet. Your living body is the self-organization of the substance of the Earth itself—minerals, water, and air—into zillions of life-forms. Earth plays Scrabble, forming different words as the genetic letters are recombined. Some words, like human, run away to live on their own, forgetting who owns the game.
If “you” are a recreational pastime for the planet, what does it have in mind for its next move? Games involve a lot of repetition, but there has to be novelty as well, with records to break and highest scores to shatter. “You” has its choice of playing fields. At one level, the Mars probe named Curiosity can be viewed as a separate human achievement, and a very complex one. It involved skilled, clever engineers and scientists who figured out how to make a robot, propel it to another world, have it land, and then send information back to us. But there’s another way of looking at it. Just as reasonably, logically, and scientifically, our living planet is reaching out to touch its neighbor.
The planet has been patient in this endeavor. While “you,” sharply focused on the separate self, were busy discovering fire, inventing agriculture, writing sacred texts, making war, having sex, and other survival stratagems, Earth may already have dreamed of tapping Mars on the shoulder. (Rudy is on a task force now aimed at protecting the brains of astronauts from cosmic radiation en route to Mars.) If this image strikes you as fanciful, look at the activity of your brain. You are conscious of having a purpose in mind when you walk, talk, work, and love. But it is undeniable that many brain activities are unconscious, while the activity of the brain as a whole is totally unknown. Whatever makes the Earth a totality makes your brain a totality. Therefore it isn’t fanciful to think of the Earth as moving in a coherent, unified direction, just as your brain has from the moment you were born.
Or to put it in a word, if you (as a person) have a purpose, then you (as life on Earth) have a purpose. Perhaps even Earth, as a collection of diverse species, just as we are a collection of microbes and mammalian cells, has a purpose in the solar system, and the solar system in the galaxy, and onward to the universe. Do we, as a species, serve a specific function on Earth, in its capacity as a “being” in the universe? Perhaps we are the immune system of our dear planet. Why? The only natural predator that can turn our planet into a lifeless rock is a giant comet or asteroid. We are the only species on Earth that can predict such an event and have a chance to prevent it. And, like our own immune system, we need it but can also be harmed by it when it goes out of whack—for example, in inflammation and autoimmune disease. These relationships from cells to human, to Earth and beyond, are seamless, even if it suits our pride to stand above and perceive ourselves as entirely separate from our surroundings.
The super genome isn’t the end of the story. It’s a work in progress. But at the very least it has stitched “you” and all of us into the tapestry of all life and the universe. In an ideal world, this would be enough to save the planet. In healing the environment, “you” would be saving it from destruction. The signs aren’t very promising so far. We hope, by offering this book, that the super genome will point more people in the right direction—taking responsibility for our genome and the planet. One thing is certain. Human evolution is mindful, and all that remains is to decide which way its mind will turn—hopefully, it will be toward the light.