With a few billion years of practise, life on Earth has gotten its process down pretty well down pat. Living things make more of themselves then eventually die themselves to make way for their offspring. Recycling reigns supreme as Jostein Gaarder put it, “A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant’s trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.” As long as living things have access to energy and can continually reproduce then there is every reason to expect this process to continue.

But then along came humankind; very smart, very curious. By playing around with a few genetic markers, researchers have created an everlasting plant. This plant won’t die off to make room for its young. It just keeps on growing, consuming atoms and capturing energy for its narcissist self. And have the researchers ever picked a good subject, the tobacco plant. Just imagine once this genetically modified construct gets into the wild, for you know it will. Tobacco plants will push out all other indigenous species. They will never die, continually growing, consuming minerals from the ground and taking all the sunshine for themselves. The land will become covered, until a natural disaster sweeps it clean and the circle of life recommences; probably from whatever a bird drops; if any birds and plant seeds remain free of our curiosity.

Where is humankind going with this? The disruption of a process that’s been ongoing for billions of years seems a bit presumptive. Are we aiming to play with our own genetic code to have humans live forever? What would we do with an Earth where people didn’t die? The population explosion would quickly shroud the land in our immediate presence. We would consume every last mineral and every last Joule of energy for ourselves. And then what?