Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

Even if you believe the earth is 8000 years old, you can only question the duration of our development from sticks and stones to carbon nanotubes and nuclear weapons. A long time ago, whenever that was, humans started from nothing… and now look at us. Only a hundred-fifty years after candles became obsolete, you are likely reading this on a self-contained, electronic hand-held device millions of times more powerful than the computers NASA used in the 1960s for the Apollo missions.

So yeah, we’re pretty arrogant about our advancement. If you don’t agree, all you have to do is consider how we marvel at our own technological evolution over the past two hundred years without really understanding what any of it means. For instance, do we really know if something strange lives in Loch Ness? And we despise our ancestors for colonizing the West, yet we plan for eventual habitation of the moon and Mars — but do we truly understand if the human body can endure those environments? Do we even know what those environments really are?

While the human race expands its knowledge regardless of the impact on us or our vicinity, we take it for granted that ours is the greatest technological expression this earth has ever seen.

But, is it?

We misunderstand the nature of our planet as a data processing device, a giant computer cycling through simulations since the origin of life 4.5 billion years ago, seeking through brute force the optimal outcome for all its life forms. After all, isn’t that what DNA is, a blueprint and a record of genetic success? And do we even understand IT?

The earth has a huge head start collecting data, and yet we mostly ignore (or destroy) its record. But, that is our arrogant nature, isn’t it. For all we know, all life around us is adapted to its environment and unable to depart it. And even if we do manage to leave this place, we may only be catching up to what the earth itself has discovered through billions of years of independent research — that, like death, leaving this place may be terminal.