At some point, our ancestors decided humans would need to be better than animals. I can imagine the fear they first experienced when they slowly became aware of their own mortality. It is possibly the greatest moment in our planet's history. For the first time in millions and millions of years of life, extinction and new life, one of the resulting products of evolution finally combined the right mix of chemicals with the brain's capacity and created self awareness.

I often wonder what the purpose of self awareness could be. Its hard for the overwhelming majority of humans to even entertain the thought that we may be an accident of chemical circumstance and serve absolutely no purpose in the grand scheme of things. They tend to dismiss any such notion as ridiculous. But when considering the universe as its own entity, something seemingly unaware of the human species existance, something so big and powerful that the entire human population would be the equivilant of a single atom, we can start to maybe get a glimpse at what is going on and what it may mean.

For me to tell another human that everything that has transpired on the planet up to this point is completely irrelevant would cast me into the catagory of insane, mentally disturbed, troubled, or an atheist. Whatever the term, the point is I am written off immediately. But perhaps you can suspend your own doubts for just a moment, to look at things from outside the box (or globe).

There are only two possiblities when you look at the entire universe and everything we are aware of in our stream of existence.

First, we know how absolutely miniscule the Earth is on the universal scale. It is possible that the existance of Earthly life is merely coincidental and has no bearing on anything that is transpiring in the grand scheme of things. This is the bleakest option: A world full of so much knowledge and understanding yet is completely irrelevant and inconsequential.

The second option, the one that wakes me up early every morning with a flurry of mental activity as I try to wrap my head around it, is that we are here by design. Not design by some singular 'god' creature, but by design of perpuation of existance.

Science has shown the universe to be constantly expanding only to collapse, our solar system will eventually collide with another, our sun will burn out (only after completely torching the earth), meteors will collide with our planet, black holes will devour us, etc. We are aware of our Earth's impending destruction.

Were we pushed to our current point, through millions of evolutionary changes, for a purpose? Is the universe aware of its own mortality? Is this too far fetched? What if the universe is on some level aware that it too is facing destruction and set into motion the events that, over billions of years, have led to today's humans?

The entire purpose of life is to create more life, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the species. Evolution has led to all different forms of life that allow one life form to feed off of another life form and thus survive and advance. Is this what happened when evolution created a brain that was chemically right for mixing with another life form, mushrooms? This combination perhaps led to our species self awareness. Was it a mere coincidence, or a scheme millenia in the making? And what would be the purpose of creating such knowledge?

Is the universe trying to create its own savior? Are we the first step of the universe's plan to create a species with the mental power to problem solve our biggest obstacle: the universe's impending doom?

If so, humans are surely not the answer, but merely a stepping stone to that ultimate goal. We are undergoing a very rapid evolution of the mind, the exceleration of which has grown exponentially in the past 100 years. It will continue to grow faster and faster until eventually, humans will no longer exist as we know them, but rather the resulting evolutionary children of humans, a new species with much greater mental capabilities, not limited by the constraints we humans have. Our great disadvantage is being the first of our kind, the first animals who are self aware. It would be foolish to believe we will be the only self aware life forms.

What I find discouraging is human's perception that this twist in evolution's advance has signaled an end to evolution. We, humans, are the pinnacle of all that the universe can muster. There can be no greater life form. Why would evolution work billions of years only to stop now? Why can't humans see this?

If anything, humans are a disasterous misstep on the road to a universal savior, a prototype that has shown important areas for improvement. And evolution will continue its work, slowly carving out whatever it needs, regardless of what we humans may want and most likely without humans interfering with the process.

This is a tragedy. Humans are capable of much more, even capable of surviving this evolutionary cut. If there were a way to point out this daunting challenge our universe now faces and convince our entire population that we are to work toward this solution, we are capable of solving it. We could effectively make the cut and continue our species for eternity. But thats asking alot of a species that is only recently self aware, so recent that we, like babies staring at their own toes and fingers, are still trying to understand what we are and what is good for us.

It's time we look beyond our selfishness. Stop fighting over land and religion, resources and money. Start looking at our plight as a math problem that we can solve. We have too many people on our planet. Disease and starvation are rampant. Our planet's life span in winding down. If we want to survive, we must leave the confines of this planet behind and set off to spread our life throughout the universe, spreading the same seed of evolution into millions of other environments and allow time and environment to shape our future changes. By taking this giant evolutionary breakthrough of self awareness and planting it in every type of 'soil' we can find, surely somewhere that seed will take root and grow bigger and better that it ever could have here on Earth.

Mixing our brains with unknown chemicals from alien environments could very well be the next step toward an evolutionary solution to the universe's impending downfall, thereby ensuring the continued existance not only of our own lifes, and that of our life giver: the universe.