Pentatrichia integra, a survival specialist

Pentatrichia integra lives well in remote places shunned by many species of the region. Crevices in montane Little Karoo sandstone away from water are not sought after real estate among the leading flowering plants. Any species adapted to cope here has little worries about competition.

This is Nature’s way of achieving a key goal: more species on a sustainable basis in the still available spaces on earth. For she hedges her bets by keeping life going in as many ways possible. Unthought of and unthinkable forms are established by differentiation as an art of the possible in the most remote and unlikely sites. Any life is preferred over any particular species and any species over any of its specimens.

She’s a great statistician, Nature, optimising the continuation of life itself via boosting the survival probabilities of also the weirdest life forms, using the most diverse resources. Nothing goes to waste in safeguarding a life form of some kind, no matter what!

She continually positions more species in more unlikely places through evolution, making only the high likelihood specimens survive until they breed. The newly designed species often target previously underused resources, making do with less or living off the leftovers of others. And all bodies, including our own, are leftovers at some point.

The grand strategy is to counter the continual losses of species due to old comfort zones disappearing. Current examples of species homes disappearing are the proliferation of human numbers on earth and climate change; correlated issues although the magnitude of this correlation is unknown.

Without any meetings of the UN or among botanists, Nature crafts new life, forms answers to the obstacles put in the way of the existing species, particularly the no-hope ones.

Who is winning in numbers, the species added or those lost? The answer is, of course, undetermined while the game is still on. There are only uneven cycles of booming growth times and declining death times. It’s Amazon forests proliferating versus bare deserts taking over.

One day the game will be finally over, the earth life whistle blown and all life participating in the current game lost! Not a single species of any kind extant to represent Life or Nature (whether she is one or two)! No start-up or rebuild residue of organisms is then available for pulling through to kindle another cycle of diversifying new species and teeming population numbers of anything. Kind of sad, one might think: No Bach, Beethoven, Bible, Iliad, Odyssey, Plato, Springboks, biltong or pizza left!

All the gazillion heavenly bodies out there are nature too, however, maybe not living but who knows? They move and change in diverse ways, at least as complex as entities zoological and botanical. Maybe the universe hides a higher form of life and even intelligence, misunderstood and unreachable by our comparative birdbrains that remain dependent on small-scale carbon compounds for earthbound backyard games.

Until life as we know it may start from scratch again on earth or somewhere else on a suitable planet. To people that constitutes the biggest miracle, for as far as we know this life start-up has only happened once ever so far, here on earth. Like the Flat Earth Society, there may also appear a (flat) life-on-earth-only club, explaining away the sound recordings that may be captured one day by the radio telescopes.

Our notion of the size of the universe has, however, grown so much over the last century, boosted by the endless discoveries of possible exoplanets where life might start or has started that the human imagination is re-ignited, watching and waiting.

On earth, a real restart of life itself has not happened, unless there were false starts in the earliest, most primitive days of life. For the first appearance of single cell organisms was not a scientifically observed and recorded event or string of events. The labs were opened much too late. We have to reconstruct not only the story of our own species birth but also that of life overall, a much bigger and older issue.

The age of discovery has never declined, although the masses prefer to watch soapies, missing the excitement. The mists of the deep past where science meets history are being clarified in instalments as our technology peers deeper, seeing the light that started moving towards us continually further back to the Big Bang.

Since life came to earth we know about six or so mass extinctions, meaning near-extinctions, because a resilient minority of survivor species pulled through the cataclysm of the day, the year, the millennium or aeon.

Nature does prepare well, moving in life cycles within all organisms. She evolves strong, competitive species, not board room planned but mass scale trial and error driven, supported by a relentless fieldwork effort in which all ever born participates.

Species are launched to fend for themselves, subject to the minimum of game rules. Only the laws of Nature herself apply. Life for all is made a tough struggle with no room for sissies and weaklings. The weak and poorly prepared for the challenges of the day (and the night) die without contributing offspring to the next generation. The selection is cruel but has a reason:

Life cares about life itself, not about any particular form of it. All participants, specimens and species struggle at the limits of their capacity to survive. And those with potential must eat. They are the ones best adapted for the living conditions of their time. And no species exceeds its time, its successful adaptation epoch.

A new mass extinction of many species, some admired by people and some not, may be in the making currently. Humanity is this time in the key destructive role, according to some people that point greenie fingers at our many bad habits.

Some think it’s pure fantasy, self-aggrandisement of humanity to rate themselves as important as a modern-day mass exterminator. But we have been naughty by being inappropriately selfish, paradoxically in a world where all of nature is selfish to the death. How so?

We grew this brain thing that developed concepts of ethics and fairness, self-made rules for human living that elevate us above nature’s standards in our rewards and obligations. Now we dont meet our own standards, but enjoy benefits like bypassing the food chain (almost always) and live far more comfortably than Nature provides for by over-use of resources.

However this may be, we shall not see the outcome of a mass extinction. For we shall be dead too. Should a small group of our species pull through the string of calamities, however, the climb to civilisation shall be so slow and hard that whatever we have developed conceptually will almost certainly have to be repeated from scratch. No recollection or record of past glory and crime will be likely, unless the newcomers become skilled at dealing with the palimpsests of their time.

And could another earth outcome way down the timeline, another scenario of how things will pan out, be at all similar to the one in existence now? Any dominant species emerging later, like super-slugs, would need their own equivalent of Pythagoras and Archimedes, a whole string of inventors, discoverers and thinkers to dodge the food chain and spread plastic like we did. Or whatever the frailties of slug-world might prove to be.

The odds are against any of this on so many levels. But time is the wonderworker. Unfortunately, no audience could ever hold its collective breath for the punchline of an evolutionary outcome.

Recovery from past mass extinctions took many millions of years. No people were around then to participate, and during this round we have only been Homo sapiens for much less than one million years. We may not make it against a durable form of flatscreen slugs.