Humanity yearns for a common purpose. A greater cause for our species to serve together. Since the dawn of civilization, we have projected this need on to clan, nation, and religion. But we have outgrown these institutions, and emerged as a generation confined to an identity of self and a globalized world devoid of a common purpose. This vacuum has brewed great global tension, and individual confusion, with no common purpose to align and guide our actions and beliefs.

Defining purpose as an individual requires looking beyond one’s self, and forming a narrative of how his or her actions could influence those around them. In the same light, we need to look beyond ourselves as a species to understand our greater role in the universe. Although our narratives paint a picture whereby humanity is the end product of evolution, with Earth and space as ours to take, we are one of millions of species that share a 4-billion-year-old story, with billions of years yet to be told. 

Countless organisms across billions of generations have lived, reproduced and died for us to get to this point, enduring suffering beyond imagination including five mass extinctions that filtered out 99.9% of the branches of the tree of life. We emerged as the first species aware of our common origins, and the power to shape the future of life as we know it. Thus, a torch has been lit in our hand that we must wield responsibly for the future of life. We thus have an opportunity to imagine what the best future for life could look like and to deliberately set it up for success.

Most of the narratives on our responsibility to other species are about conservation, yet I argue that expansion is far more worthy a cause. Most of the real estate for life is not here on Earth. We are not more than a few generations away from taking to the stars, unlocking billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. It is our great responsibility to ensure that this is not just leveraged for human good, but to grow the tree of life into a forest of life, with orders of magnitude more “endless forms most beautiful” being evolved. Mankind is not the end product, but rather the middle man in this story. 

Evolution has thus far produced a novel, ultra-efficient system for harnessing energy and matter into life, a stable atmosphere, and functional specialization that has filled every ecological niche on Earth. It has also produced the bedrock for intelligence as we know it, both biological and artificial, through neural networks. And this is just on a single planet. With ongoing innovation in space transport, it will be possible to expand the playground of evolution to billions of planets in our galaxy in a million years, and quadrillions of planets across the Virgo supercluster in a billion years. Imagine what new  kingdoms of life could emerge if evolution were increased by several orders of magnitude, bringing entirely new forms of consciousness and intelligence, enriching the experience and meaning of life beyond our imaginations. 

We will need to overcome several challenges to fulfill this role. One is enhancing our space transport capabilities, opening access to the wider galaxy through making interstellar transport feasible. Another is better understanding the conditions on exoplanets, including the presence of alien life, to select uninhabited exoplanets suitable for Earth-derived life. Given Earth-derived life would struggle to adapt to the starkly contrasting planetary environments elsewhere, we will need to vastly  improve our ability to engineer life to enable it to reach new worlds. Lastly, we will need to align humanity and coordinate our resources on a grand multi-generational project to set this up for success.

We will face many distractions tempting us from this path, including a future whereby humanity colonizes the galaxy for our own utility. This would be an extension of our current activity on Earth, shaping life merely for our benefit but constraining its broader potential. This path would likely lead to interplanetary conflicts at scale across diverging descendants, akin to popular science fiction, culminating in a reaper civilization to rule them all and control the galaxy’s energy.  Another dangerous path is we may concede the future of life to artificial intelligence, betraying our ancestors and severing any future growth of the tree of life. 

Surrendering control to the broader tree of life  acts against our natural drive for control, but we ought to view this as a good parent would, and limit our role to nurturing, providing and protecting the future of life such that it has the space to flourish. We may need to serve such a parenting role for millions of years while life takes a foothold across the galaxy.

In the long annals of history, of millions to billions of years, how we propagate life will be what our species is remembered for. All progress that came before us, from our evolution to the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions, have been steps in preparation for our grander duty to nurture the future of life. The upside of doing this correctly is beyond imagination, but so is the downside of being ill prepared. We should therefore pour all of our resources into setting this grand project up for success, led by moral clarity, scientific excellence, and a vision of what life could be if we look beyond ourselves. All that came before and all that are yet to come are watching us. Nothing has ever been more important.