Results tagged “Evolution” from Astranaut

Like many people I believe the current crisis is a wake-up call for humanity.  However, unlike many of the voices dominating the discussion lately, I have come to some very different conclusions.

The dirty little secret behind many environmental movements and their followers is a deep wish to see large segments of the human population die off.  This way the the Earth can restore itself from the overpopulated human civilization that has drained it.  Ideally, these same loyal econauts see themselves as inheriting this New Earth paradise after all the unworthy people have died off.  If you think I'm making this up or exaggerating, just ask them. One prominent "visionary" (who shall go nameless) said if people don't get with the program, they will be turned into mulch. Being an environmentalist myself, I'm not accusing all of them, just many of the louder voices currently dominating the conversation. You'll hear all sorts of scenarios of doom, gloom, and even glee that when it's all over, the Earth will have maybe at most a billion inhabitants left (if we're lucky) by the end of the 21st Century.  Did I mention those same people will ride bicycles or walk, as technological civilization will be gone? These same people wax poetic about "peak civilization", a "return to nature", deindustrialization, and a wholesale shedding of technology. They're just like Ted Kaczynski, only nicer and not wanting to blow you up personally... nature will do it for them.

However they are right about one thing.  Given our current level of dirty technology, population growth and rates of resource extraction, the human game of continual growth and material abundance cannot continue much longer without a severe environmental backlash from simple resource constraints.  You can't extract what's no longer there.  In other words, unless we find a way to magically transform our society through advanced nanotechnology into one that is 100% regenerative, large segments of the population will die off from a lack of resources necessary to feed, house and clothe them.

The honest truth is advanced nano-enabled regenerative technology is still a distant dream, and until it's realized, we can't count on it.  Instead we must solve our problems now using tools already available or that can be built without requiring unforseen breakthroughs.

Clearly as long as we continue doing business within a fragile planetary ecosystem, pretty much everything we do needs to change, adapt, ephermalize, regenerate. I just hope that along with these changes, we don’t loose site of the bigger impetus which this all points - which is to continue onward, upward, outward off the planet and become a space faring species.

This is the first time in our planets evolution such a possibility is upon us. Given what’s at stake (massive ecological, economic and population collapse), it’s now or never that a strong push for space development must be made. Those talking about peak civilization and mandatory de-industrialization are a depressing, anti-evolutionary lot.

I think when real-world constraints start culling the population, radical evolutionary pressures upward will re-exert themselves. I’ve never known people to go quietly in the night, especially when bigger, better alternatives present themselves.

My fellow Lifeboat adviser Brian Wang is actively working on some very radical space propulsion designs which could reduce orbital launch costs to less than $1/Kg without the need for any new technological advances.

When billions of lives are at stake from a lack of biosphere support capacity, space migration is by far the saner choice, especially when many if not most industrial processes can be taken off world.

This way everyone wins.  The ecoheads can celebrate as all the industrialized processes they hate so much move wholesale offworld.  The Earth, through tender stewardship by those choosing to stay behind, can be ushered back into a veritable garden of Eden without it requiring any devolution or death of the human species. 

Although the article does not explain precisely why the weakest of three species in a cyclical hierarchy, it is an interesting read nevertheless.  It compares the process to the rock, paper, scissors game where each species has at least one advantage over the other.

"LMU researchers have now simulated the progression of a cyclic competition of three species. It means that each participant is superior to one other species, but will be beaten by a third interaction partner. “In this kind of cyclical concurrence, the weakest species proves the winner almost without exception,” reports Professor Erwin Frey, who headed the study. “The two stronger species, on the other hand, die out, as experiments with bacteria have already shown. Our results are not only a big surprise, they are important to our understanding of evolution of ecosystems and the development of new strategies for the protection of species.”

"Such cyclical interaction is also familiarly termed “rock-paper-scissors” interaction. This is where the rock blunts the scissors, which cut the paper, which in turn wraps around the rock. Together, these non-hierarchical relationships form a cyclical motion. “The game can help describe the diversity of species,” explains Frey. “The background is a branch of mathematics called game theory, and in this case evolutionary game theory. It helps analyze systems that involve multiple actors whose interactions are similar to those in parlor games.”

"This “law of the weakest” even held true when the difference between the competing species was slight. “This result was just as unexpected for us,” reports Frey. “But it shows once more that chance plays a big part in the dynamics of an ecosystem. Incidentally, in experiments that were conducted a couple of years ago on bacterial colonies, in order to study cyclical competition, there was one clear result: The weakest of the three species emerged victorious from the competition.”

Humanity is going to survive. Already we are undergoing rapid technological change, becoming more modular, flexible and adaptable. In a very real sense almost every human alive today is in the process of becoming transhuman.

This is an issue I’ve thought about a long time – the future, the future of humanity, of life and intelligence. It would be fair to say it has been an obsession at times. Depending on the level of attachment I've had to particular outcome, that obsession has taken its toll on my ego, resulting in times of joy, optimism and delight, as well as grief, sorrow and crippling paranoia. I’ve delved deep into both science and mysticism, inner and outer space, looking for answers, clues to where life is heading. Some would say that life is heading nowhere in particular, that it is nothing more than a product of blind evolution and random mutation meandering its way through time. But yet, there is evolution. Although perhaps on the microscopic scale random mutation reigns supreme, over time there is a clear movement from simplicity to complexity. From homogeneity to diversity. From entropy to extropy. Now life has filled every niche, even niches that no scientist could ever have thought possible less than a decade ago. There is life in the bottom of the ocean, in high pressure boiling water, and miles deep below the Antarctic ice shelf. Humanity with our intelligence has steadily moved from cave dwelling hunter gatherers, barely surviving from one generation to the next, into a global species capable of surviving everywhere, even in the cold vacuum of outer space.

There is a vector then to this march of evolution through time. And it hasn’t come without its fair share of bruises. Solar Storms, tectonic shifts, cometary and meteor impacts, global atmospheric poisoning, super-volcanoes, ice ages and global warming – resulting in at least 5 major extinctions in earth’s history.

And now we have our modern era. One that for most people is filled with fear and gloom, and what some scientists are now saying is earths sixth great extinction. Throughout history humanity has had its own fair share of bruises - starvation, disease, famine, wars, plagues, cultural clashes, and mother nature. Yet we have survived every manner of both environmental assault and human folly. And now in our present era we are experiencing the most rapid change our planet has ever seen, due almost entirely to a feedback loop in which we are directly amplifying and being amplified by. Depending on who you talk to, and more importantly how you interpret the overwhelming amount of incoming data, we are either heading for extinction or transcending into something altogether new and spectacular – a quantum evolutionary leap equivalent or exceeding in magnitude all evolutionary leaps before it.

At this point almost every intelligent person has weighed in on the subject. Technologist like Bill Joy thinks that our chances of survival are slim. The astophysicist Martin Rees and the technologist-inventor Ray Kurzweil are putting our odds at around 50/50. And the Singularitarians are saying that unless a super intelligence can be created soon, are odds of making it are less than 1%. So who’s right? One thing is for certain, the means of our destruction are multiplying and falling into ever greater numbers of hands. As Mark Pesce says, we are rapidly approaching the day when, for all intents and purposes, every child will have tactical nuclear weapons.

Yet, despite these alleged facts and expert pontificated probabilities, I’m placing my bets on the survival and prosperity of intelligent life. And it won’t be just survival that is life’s inheritance, but abundant, glorious, diverse and ultimately supremely happy life expanding rapidly out into the universe towards infinity.

How did I come to this conclusion? First and foremost life has always made it, and the historical evidence continues to mount. But more importantly - despite every major new piece of data that says we shouldn't be here, we shouldn't have survived, our existence is testament that we did! The fact that anything exists at all is pretty miraculous. And according to inflationary theory, our universe teeters on the edge of zero-point vacuum fluctuations that could wipe us all out in an instant. Yet we are still here! But something more than just scientific evidence moved me to this conclusion. Not long ago, for a few precious moments I slipped the bonds of my ego long enough to see that life is doing just fine, despite my own ego’s particular problems or worries to the contrary. All my life, I have in some manner placed my ego at the center of what is important, what constitutes what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, what will improve our odds of survival and/or diminish it. Like most people, I deeply feared death in some manner or other. Yet, as I look around at all that is happening, my ego, and probably yours too is under assault from constant accelerating change, information anxiety, unpredictability and increasing uncertainty as to whether we as individuals will survive. Because I placed my worldview within the context of my ego, I increasingly came to the conclusion that life will not make it. When it is more accurate to say that any one individual life, including mine is faced with greater uncertainty. In turn I placed my ego in line with humanity and life as a whole, mistakingly placing the odds of my survival in line with that of the whole species. Having transcended my ego long enough to see this, I no longer despair at what has always been true anyway, that my ego will not survive even if my physical form remains intact. The changes are too drastic for my ego to remain intact. Each day our ego's go through almost imperceptible little mini-deaths and rebirths. Every so often, a traumatic even results in a larger death and rebirth of our worldview. Hopefully this rebirth results in a more positive and life affirming mindset. As the world goes through more change, our ego has to evolve, and transcend itself more and more if it hopes to stay in the game, amidst increasing novelty and unpredictability.

In every sense the world politic has never been more unstable than it is now. Those in power are feeling this change even more than we are. While we experienced the ups and downs of economic cycles, those at the top lived under relative stability. But now the degree of change is so rapid, that even their cocoon of stability is under direct assault. Their long used habits of maintaining the status quo are failing, and they are having to constantly re-think new ways of maintaining control. As a friend reminded me recently quoting Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers". This fact is scaring the hell out of them, and so they are rapidly making attempts to bring the entire resources of the globe under their direct control. The evidence is all around us. The question is will they succeed? No. They may come close, but things are moving way too fast now. Change is so great that all their models of control are obsoleted before they can ever become policy. In the time it takes them to think up a new method of control, life and change have evolved past their model. Unfortunately these people are really desperate. Think of them as drug addicts who have become long accustomed to having absolute power, or at least sufficient power to maintain their way of life. They are now loosing that power to the decentralized forces of the network. More and more power is falling into the hands of more and more people, at ever cheaper costs. Al Qaeda may be a convenient boogeyman for them, but it is also symbolic of this decentralization that is scaring them so much.

Bruce Sterling has speculated that this decentralization of power is going to make for one very crazy ride, where thugs of every variety will be committing atrocities all over the globe. A complete breakdown of nation states into tribal feuding thugs, duking it out for control of markets and territories, while the rest of us are caught in the middle. I have no doubt this is one likely possibility. Unfortunately, this acceleration of technological savvy and networked intelligence will continue to increase, and those thugs in turn will find it increasingly difficult to maintain any kind of control.

Meanwhile, the chances of accidental or intentional release of a nasty bug that wipes out a large percentage of humanity is becoming more likely. The question is how will humanity respond to all of this? If there is one thing people hate it is despotism. Every chance people are given a chance they always choose democracy. Despite ever increasing stupidity of the US government in attempting to lock down the internet, the world is wising up to this. I have no idea how any of this will shape up or shake out. My guess is there is going to be a lot of death and destruction. I would not be surprised at all if 80% or more of humanity is wiped out ever the next 20 years. Some have even said that is in fact the agenda of those in power. That may be so, but their biggest mistake will be thinking they will control this new world in the wake of so much death and destruction. Although 80% of humanity might be dead, the remaining 20% are going to be extremely motivated. And even though the technologies of control will be unprecedented, so too will the power of technology be in the streets. The collective power of the network made possible by ever smarter social software will allow collective action like the world has never seen. The balance of power is already shifting in this direction at rapid pace, and desperate attempts to tip that balance back will be temporary at best.

So after every major catastrophe, despotism, global war, nuclear attacks, biological virus, there will be survivors. Because if life has learned anything is that it wants to survive. And humanity being the intelligent edge of this evolutionary life force will use all of its drive to survive. Through the massive collective action of individuals powered by decentralized networks, people will build new communities and move forward past all of these horrible atrocities. We/They will look back at all the mistakes that were made that led to such devastation and vow never to repeat them. We/They will be deeply grateful to all of us alive today who lived right now doing our best to sort it all out, and who were alive as humanity and all of life enters the coming bottleneck. Life and in turn humanity will go on to prosper, evolve into transhumanity, post-humanity taking the best of everything and shedding the worst as it moves out into the cosmos. Our ego's have no choice.

The other day I decided to re-examine the idea of using the latest discoveries of science to determine when the earliest possible time our universe could give rise to the first technological singularity. What are the necessary preconditions for a singularity, and when is the earliest possible time such pre-conditions could have emerged?

Let’s examine the physical evidence and make some conjectures.

In order to determine the earliest theoretical time frame, we need to know what the necessary precursors of a technological singularity are. Since the Earth and the emergence of our own civilization is the only example we have, we’ll assume that life and therefore technological civilization requires a planet as a necessary prerequisite for a technological singularity.

So when were the first planets formed? Since planets require heavy elements, the earliest possible time would be after a supernova explosion of a first-generation star. Since these first generation stars were composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements necessary for planetary formation were not available yet. However, thanks to nucleosynthesis in the core of these stars, these necessary heavier elements were created at a furious pace. These first generation stars first appeared 160 million years after the Big Bang. The most short-lived of these were the blue giants. After the first of these blue stars exploded, all of the material necessary for planetary formation was available to give birth to second generation stars with planetary bodies.

According to this story at the New York Times, the Hubble Space Telescope found tantalizing evidence that planets first appeared much earlier in cosmic history, around 1 billion years after the big bang, and therefore may be more abundant than previously suspected. Since we know both the earth and sun are each 4.5 billion years old, the earliest possible earth like planets could have appeared as early as 12.7 or 13.7 billion years ago, depending on who you ask. According to this article, the universe may be 1 billion years older than previously thought, moving the age of the universe from 13.7 to 14.7 billion years old.

So from here we need to examine Earth’s history to determine the next part of our equation. This is where a bit of guesswork is required.

There is observational evidence that archaebacteria, the first type of life, were around as early as 3.97 billion years ago. Then for the next 2.2 billion years, life on earth consisted of nothing more than anaerobic bacteria and archaeans. Then about 1.8 billion years ago eukaryotic cells appeared as fossils too. With the beginning of the Middle Proterozoic 1.8 billion years ago, comes the first evidence of oxygen build-up in the atmosphere. This global catastrophe spelled doom for many bacterial groups, but made possible the explosion of eukaryotic forms. These include multicellular algae, and toward the end of the Proterozoic, the first animals.

With the Cambrian Explosion soon after, all the major phyla of life we know today emerged. Between the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago and today there have been 5 great extinctions, the last of which was 65 million years ago, when 90% of life, including all the Dinosaurs, were wiped out by a comet. From the lowly 10% that was left emerged almost all the complex life we see today.

The real question now is could this 3.97 billion year history of life have happened at an accelerated rate? We know the first 2.2 billion years of life consisted of nothing more than simple anaerobic bacteria and archae, and the next 1.2 billion years single-celled eukaryotic oxygen-breathing bacteria. So for the first 3.4 billion years the degree of evolutionary change was almost non-existent. There is no reason to suspect the emergence of eukaryotic cells couldn’t have happened sooner, perhaps as earlier as a few million years after the first bacteria. The mechanisms underlying these punctuated periods of evolution are still largely unknown, so it’s mostly conjecture. But lets take a crack at it anyway.

I think most of this period’s stagnation was the result bad luck, or perhaps a lack of good luck. A low probability of correct mutations necessary for the emergence of multi-cellular life may be the reason it took so long. We know that quadrillions of bacteria were spread out all over the earth, and only after 3.4 billion years relative stagnation did it eventually give rise to the first multi-cellular organisms. If this is the result of statistics rather than a slow necessary build up of a complex ecology, then life multi-cellular life could have emerged shortly after the first life appeared, maybe as little as a few millions of years, rather than 3.4 billion. Then again, mutli-cellular life could be so rare, that only 1 out of a million bacteria bearing planets give rise to multi-cellular life during the lifetime of its parent star.

It’s possible that multi-cellular creatures could have emerged as early as 3 billion years ago, giving rise to the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion 2.5 billion years earlier than it did. This leaves the last 543 million years after the Cambrian Explosion until now. Perhaps if we had a larger gas giant in a orbit closer than Jupiter’s, there would've been less asteroid and cometary impacts, further accelerating the right kinds of conditions for life to occur. In the scheme of things, this time frame is small enough that it doesn't matter much with a 13.7-14.7 billion year time frame. So for the sake of this essay, I'll assume that 500 million years is the minimum time necessary for complex technological civilization to evolve from the first appearance of multi-cellular life.

Assuming my 2.5 billion year compression of the history of life is possible in a planetary system with the right conditions, this means technological civilization on the Earth could have occurred as early as 2 billion years after the formation of Earth itself.

Since we know that the first planets were forming as early as 13.7 billion years ago, and using earth’s history as our example, this means the first technological singularity could have occurred as early as 10.7 billion years ago, or just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. If we take out my conjectured time compression of evolution, we add an additional 2.5 billion years, giving us 5.5 billion years after the big bang.

This leaves us with a theoretical minimum of 8.2 – 11.7 billion years ago, that a technological singularity could have first occurred.

This means a civilization, having passed through the bottleneck of a technological singularity, could have emerged as early as 4 to 6 billion years before our Sun was even born, some 12 billion years more advanced than our own.

So, what are the odds that life exists elsewhere?

We now know from the Mars Opportunity Probe, that Mars once contained a salt-water sea. The importance of this finding cannot be overstated.

Until now, we have known for sure of only one planet on which liquid water has flowed -- and water is absolutely essential for supporting life as we know it. There are no chemical processes that will permit the formation of the long, complex organic molecules composing living organisms other than in the presence of water.

It is an extremely simple rule: No water, no life. As long as Earth was the only planetary body containing liquid water -- and, more particularly, seawater -- then it was the only place in the universe where life was possible.

Now, suddenly, there are two. And that’s just in our local planetary group. Now that there are two planets where water once flowed, there no longer is a reason to doubt that millions, perhaps billions of water bearing planets might exist right within our own Milky Way galaxy.

Further out, thanks to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the observable universe appears to contain several hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. This means there could be trillions of planets bearing water and possibly life.

Tying this in with the above preconditions for live and the probabilistic chances of technological singularities occurring with some frequency as long as 8.2 to 11.7 billion year ago, the universe could likely have advanced civilizations who are as much as 12 billion years more advanced than us.

What would their technology be like? Is the reason we don’t see them, because they have evolved so far, that this dimension of existence, our four dimensional space-time continuum been completely transcended by them?

Perhaps they already spread through the universe, have recorded every last part of it, and we are now in one of their simulations.

It reminds me of Clarke’s Law (by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke):

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magick.

Quoting from the book Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson,

Imagine a technology a hundred years beyond ours. A thousand years beyond ours. A million years beyond ours. And then remember that many stars, which might have planets and civilizations, are literally billions of years older than our sun. There might be intelligences in this galaxy advanced as much as 12 billion years beyond our technology.

If Clarke is right, even on a materialistic level, the only answer to “How many advanced Civilizations are monitoring the events in this room?” must be “As many as want to”

Wilson’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law:

Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology is indistinguishable from Magick.

Consider the slow advance of parapsychology, despite entrenched opposition, during the past 70 years. Project it forward another hundred years. A thousand years. A million. And imagine intelligences 12 billion years ahead of us in this area.

Extraterrestrials with advanced psionic knowledge may have been experimenting on us and/or aiding our evolution and/or playing ontology games with us for millions of years, projecting any form they desire from Mescalito to the Lord God Jehovah, without ever leaving their home planet.

Are UFO’s simply some part of their ontology game? Part of some gentle stimulus to keep us guessing, keep us evolving?

I just read an interesting excerpt from Edward O Wilson's book 'The Future of Life' over at James Media:

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

I agree with this on many levels, but Wilson and many other environmentalist are missing a much larger picture; one that is staring us right in the face - The human species with all our technology and pollution is a part of nature.

How can otherwise really intelligent people like Wilson miss this very basic point? My theory is they're still suffering from an anthropocentric view that we are somehow elevated or at least removed from nature somehow. How is this even possible? To me this is a hang up from peoples left-over religious memes continuing to permeate their thinking. So although these intelligent people have embraced the sancity of life they have retained the medievel illusion that we are not part of nature, or at the very most a plague, a virus, or a cancer that needs to be eradicated for the benefit of life as a whole. Personally I have no make-wrong about any form of life, even predatory life like viruses. They exist and propogate, just like we do. Since our co-existence could easily become competitive, I have to either resign to its right to life, or fight for my own right to live. Well, selfish or altruistic - I want to live, so the virus must loose if I have anything to say about it.

If, as Wilson claims, it has come down between humanity and the biosphere, which he claims we can't live without (not necessarily true), then the biospheres survival choice would be to wipe us out as a disease. Well this hasn't happened yet, despite nature's apparent attempts. So Wilson says, "we must forget our urge to colonize space, to expand technologically. We must get back to nature".

But Mr. Wilson are you listening? WE HAVE NEVER LEFT!

We are a part of nature, and nature is a part of us. We are inextricably one and the same. Our inexorable drive to expand and explore is what life itself has always done. Life has never once settled into complete homestasis. There has always been a small segment of it mutating, evolving, growing, expanding, filling new niches, creating new habitats. Without intelligence the biopshere will eventually die in a billion years from the Suns lethal radiation output. But evolved intelligent life expaning beyond the womb planet does have a chance of living indefinitely. Perhaps if I'm still around I might be able help Earth survive this heat death. In the meantime, the biosphere is plugging along nicely, despite our civilization. Yes, we are seeing massive species extinction. This is not the first time, but at least the fifth time this has happened, and the biosphere has survived all of them. Either way, I want to survive and see the complexity and diversity of life that Wilson talks about survive also. Therefore these two drives are not mutually exclusive, something many environmentalist like Wilson refuse to see.

I'm not willing to sacrifice my life and that of the only known intelligent life on the off-chance that we might screw it up and take all of life with us. We simply do not know enough about the 'big picture' to know if killing ourselves off is the right answer. And unfortunately there are some wackos out there, like the one depicted on Twelve Monkeys, who would be willing to make that collective decision for us.

No, I'm with people like Timothy Leary, Robery Anton Wilson , Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan on this one. I think whats really happening is the Biosphere (aka Gaia) is giving birth, and we are part of this birth. Ladies and Gentleman, life is about to leave the womb planet and spread out into the universe. And this isn't just plain old life, but intelligent life, complex life, beyond anything a mere bacterium or even domesticated primates like ourselves can imagine at the moment. As Leary said, pollution is the by-product of a successful species, just like the aerobic Eukaryotic cell polluted the atmosphere of primitive earth with oxygen forcing the anaerobic prokaryotic undreground or into extinction. If it wasn't for this so-called pollution, eukaryotic life would not have evolved multi-cellular life, resulting in the Cambrian explosion and our beautiful green earth today.

There was an old debate raging in the circles of the transhumanist community back a few years, Gaians vs Extropians. Like then, and now these two philosophies are not mutually exclusive. I consider myself to be both. I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to survive, prosper and grow, while making every attempt to minimize the damage to the biosphere along the way. If done right, nanotechnologies are the most environmentally friendly technology that could possibly exist. In no time at all, nanotechnology could reverse every "damaging" thing we've ever done, while simulataneously bootstrapping civilization to the stars.

I adore nature. I just spent the last weekend communing with wildlife up here in the Sierras, basking in the spring sun, smelling the flowers, appreciating the delicately evolved balance of flora and fauna around where I camped. In most respects I'm a tree hugger. But I also love my computer, and can't wait to travel the cosmos in search of other intelligent life, expand my personal intelligence and wisdom without end and become a cosmic immortal. I believe the philosophies of Gaia and Extropy are two sides of the same coin - both are inherently against entropy. Any apparent difference is an illusionary false dichomotomy. I believe the "Gaians" and "Extropians" will each need the other for long term survival of any kind of life. Only intelligence has the capacity to meet the threats to life head on. An asteroid almost wiped out all life 65 million years ago. The next time that asteroid doesn't stand a chance.