Now back to the trigger...

And as promised, I shall get back to the original train of thoughts...

When an organism's body is invaded by foreign living matter- virus or bacteria etc, it gets sick. The body mounts a reaction to fight and kill the invaders. The invaders are harmful to the body because they compete for the same resources for survival and sustenance. The body, as in humans, for example ( this is easy to visualize), we mount a reaction of fever, depletion and tiredness. We may throw up and vomit, we may collapse from lack of energy and eventually, if we are not able to kill the invader, we get killed.

Now, consider the macrocosm... the universe. We are invading the earth, competing for the same resources that make the earth what it is. We are simply taking away and not replacing- like parasites that invade our bodies. The earth is fighting back! The fever (global warming) and the throwing up ( floods, volcanoes) and the trembling (earthquakes) are happening more and more.

Either the earth will succeed in surviving, will kill the parasitic invader who is becoming a nemesis or will die out taking the invading organism (us) with it!

Who or what is to say that we are primary forms of life and the bacteria/viruses that cause the flu or the malaria or the meningitis have any less right to survival than us? What makes our killing these with vaccines and antibiotics justifiable and their life killing us unjustifiable. And what makes the earth any less living than any of us? What if the earth is an entity that has been infected by us whereas the other planets are pristine and healthy? Living and pulsating entities?

Is that not an interesting point of view? A really fantastic leap from the microcosm to the macrocosm?

Either we must learn to survive in a symbiotic relationship, whereby we contribute as much to the earth's survival as we take away from her or we must perish- whether the earth's immune reaction kills us or her own death takes our lives away, too.