Today, almost all of Russia is on fire. Europe and Asia - under water. Nature, as they say in such cases, "has gone mad and wants to exterminate the human race." This standard saying, however, may contain a good deal of truth. According to the RAS adviser, the former director of the RAS Institute of Protein, Academician Alexander Spirin, rivers overflow their banks and forests burn because nature no longer needs people. However, she did not need them before, but as long as they did not interfere with the existence of the biosphere, nature did not need to defend herself, and now she is restoring biological justice. Obviously, people will not sit idly either. How will this confrontation end?
Nature doesn't need us
“Today we have reconstructed the picture of the origin of the biosphere on the young Earth with a high degree of certainty,” says Alexander Spirin. - Some time after cooling down, the planet was a giant community of microorganisms - bacteria and archaea. All this worked as a single living organism, and it was this, and not at all the appearance of you and me, that was the highest peak in the development of the biosphere”. Later, there was a transition from an integral system to a nonlinear one, in which the resulting organisms began to eat each other. Here the stratification of the biosphere began, leading to its highest point - the emergence of a man who, over time, began to harm the biosphere. Scientists have been warning for many years: our vital activity will sooner or later lead to the fact that all natural balances will be disrupted, and then it will become impossible to live on the planet - we will die from cataclysms. There is another version - about a living planet that tolerates humanity until it hurts it. On this occasion, there is even an anecdote about how two planets met, and one asks the other: “You don't look good. Homo sapiens didn't pick it up? " It is interesting that if the Earth gets rid of the disease "homo sapiens", neither she nor her biosphere will be harmed, and even more so it will not die. “We will not win this fight,” said Spirin. - The biosphere will live fine without us, as it has lived for four billion years. There were crises in its history, but nothing more. "if the Earth gets rid of the "homo sapiens" disease, neither it nor its biosphere will be harmed, and even more so, it will not die. “We will not win this fight,” said Spirin. - The biosphere will live fine without us, as it has lived for four billion years. There were crises in its history, but nothing more. "if the Earth gets rid of the "homo sapiens" disease, neither it nor its biosphere will be harmed, and even more so, it will not die. “We will not win this fight,” said Spirin. - The biosphere will live fine without us, as it has lived for four billion years. There were crises in its history, but nothing more."
The fact is that, by and large, the biosphere is a community of ancient bacteria and archaea, and people are just a small biological mass. According to the academician, the seas, rivers and forests do not need us at all. We need them because they ensure our existence. No matter how trite it sounds: the payment for a comfortable life is their destruction and, consequently, a reduction in the lifespan of the human population. It is even impossible to argue here - everyone knows the dependence of an increase in the number of various diseases on ecologically unfavorable conditions.
The expectation that modern high technologies and biomedicine will save us from these troubles, Spirin believes, is a dead-end road. In his opinion, biomedicine leads precisely to the death of mankind: as soon as we begin to treat diseases en masse using genetic engineering methods, we will save mankind from terrible diseases, we will turn into a decaying gerontological society with bad heredity, since genetic engineering also burdens us with lethal genes. Bioprosthetics, the appearance of symbionts is the road to the gradual killing of humanity, and not at all extending its life for an indefinitely long period.
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We don't need nature
However, this is just one point of view, albeit one that has many supporters. There are others. For example, the famous scientist Vladimir Vernadsky spoke about the transformation of the Earth's biosphere into a noosphere consciously organized and controlled by man. According to this theory, which also has followers, nature can no longer exist and develop without the conscious control of man. Why then resist her? Modern researchers have gone further, and a theory has appeared that people will soon not need the biosphere at all - they will be able to perfectly do without it. So all cataclysms are a temporary inconvenience, a turning point in the confrontation between man and nature.
Academician Erik Galimov, Director of the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. VI Vernadsky RAS, believes, no matter how we try to save the world dying before our eyes, nothing will work. Ultimately, man will find himself, and has already largely found himself, in the artificial world. And very soon it will simply cease to be a part of the biological world. It will not depend on atmospheric oxygen produced by plants, because it can be obtained by electrolysis. So forests are simply useless. He does not need animal meat, because he can synthesize any set of amino acids. Of course, people have not yet reached this state, but they are moving towards it. And when they come, the existence of life on Earth will cease to be a condition of its own existence. He can master, for example, the moon, creating his settlements there,and to preserve biological life in the form of landscape reserves and biological parks for fun and entertainment.
This is how an anthropogenic world will arise. And in this new world the question will inevitably arise: does a person need his biological needs at all? After all, their logic was dictated by the meaning of life. Outside biological life, their very purpose and mechanism of implementation lose their original meaning - to serve as a means of selection and evolution. Therefore, the next step in the development of technological civilization will be the elimination of human biological functions, the academician believes. It is not difficult to foresee the possibility of a radical change in the mechanism of nutrition and procreation (they are already changing today), the successive replacement of biogenic organs with technogenic ones, and the gradual emergence of a biotechnogenic hybrid. But the decisive step will be to eliminate mortality. The finiteness of the existence of an individual is an indispensable condition for the evolution of life. But this is also a condition for the stability of any developing set. Will the technogenic civilization overcome this dangerous line? Here scientists cannot give a clear answer.
Issue price
Which version turns out to be correct is an open question. But, as adherents of various scientific trends note, the process of our biosphere entering the point of bifurcation - the beginning of chaos - is obvious. It can be assumed that, having given birth to civilization, the biosphere approached the border of its stability. Just as an organism reaches its maximum biological age, so life on Earth in its development, perhaps, is nearing its end. On the other hand, this chaos may well pass for the beginning of a new round of our already extra-biological existence.
But maybe try to preserve the life structure on Earth that exists today and, by and large, suits most people? Moreover, it is not at all necessary to accept the version of the opposition of nature and man as the truth. We live in such a time, says academician Yuri Izrael, director of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology of Roshydromet and the Russian Academy of Sciences, when huge geological periods associated with changes in the natural environment can shrink not even to hundreds, but to tens of years. And at the dawn of earthly history, the process of such changes took many millennia. That is why, the scientist believes, we are in danger right now, and if we want to live, then we must get out of the framework of empty discussions and theories and focus on developing scientifically based measures to protect the biosphere and the climate system. It would be nice to start with the forests,which burn so defiantly scary …
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Genrikh Ivanitsky, Director of the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences:
- We cannot find a common language with living nature because there is no such science - theoretical biology. Theoretical constructions permeate all sections of biology, but semantically they are not united. The eminent Russian scientist Vasily Nalimov noticed 15 years ago: the central problem of theoretical biology could be formulated as a dialectic of opposition - variability versus stability. Why does everything in the living world exist in incomprehensible diversity? Why does volatility lock into resilience that we humansready to perceive as something harmonious? In what language can diversity and its variability be described? What properties should biological space and time possess? What is the fundamental difference between the stability of the physical world and the stability of the living world? There are no clear answers to these questions yet.
The problem rests primarily on the search for a language that is adequate to the diversity of living things. And it is clear that this language should be different from the language of mathematics and physics, since it describes completely different phenomena. At the same time, the role of an observer - a person - is enormous here. Since ancient times, man has created new texts of nature. Previously, he did this by referring to artificial selection. Now in his hands is a much more powerful and formidable (due to its unpredictability) weapon - genetic engineering. Physicists cannot do anything of the kind - they are not capable of creating new physical worlds. And if in physics the existence of some abstract observer is allowed, then in biology it is a real observer, ready to act as the creator of a new world. But how, according to what rules, will he create if he is not armed with a biological theory? We have not mastered the basics of biology, have not created the theory of this science,did not understand the essence of many existing phenomena, such as hypnosis, so it is too early for us to talk about primacy in nature. We, of course, are part of the biosphere and must correspond to it.
Lyudmila Shaposhnikova, General Director of the Museum named after Nicholas Roerich:
- Nicholas Roerich and his wife Elena Ivanovna wrote a lot about Armageddon as an inevitable phenomenon that has already begun. They believed that fire would become not only the end of the world in which machines and money rule, but also the beginning of the world to come, where cosmic thinking would be the main value. Fire in world philosophy and religion is not just a blind element, but the power of nature, which brings purification and saving truth. It is the symbolic fire, the ancient philosophers believed, that propels humanity forward. I must say that the philosophical understanding of the world as a complex, changing organism has faced difficulties for a long time. So, it was believed that space, plants, animals and people are unchanged. The idea of the volatility of the world at one time became a revelation for scientists. One of the discoverers of perpetual motion was Heraclitus. The world appeared to him in the form of "living fire", a fiery river, into the escaping streams of which one cannot enter twice. An image that is the best suited for today.
Natalia Leskova