If the Earth is sentient one might suppose that like all living creatures it craves life. Not the zombie kind of crave. I mean it desires long life, something we all want. With only 7 other siblings in the solar system I can see why it might be a concern. Survival of the species becomes paramount. Even on Earth the primary driving force is procreation. All life spreads.

Still, how does a world procreate? Is it a single entity that splits or does it create spores and cast them out upon the solar wind? Or more violently does it require a smashing of worlds to cast off bits of our living tissue, where it hopefully falls on fertile ground some million years hence.

The human body is a collection of disparate systems and organisms that function collectively as a whole, surrounded by a skin that serves as the house that is us. Inside range complex systems and simple chemistry that work seeming magic as we walk about our daily lives.

Perhaps all life on this world is the expression of our living planet. Maybe we’re the hair and teeth and nerve endings of the Earth. As we spread across the planet we cover it with a living, breathing skin of glowing, electrified life. As we reach beyond this planet we extend the reach of our world . The Earth experiences the universe through the life it sends out. For now that could be us; tomorrow it could be some other species who inherits this planet long after we’ve left it. But go we must if only because staying here is a definite death sentence. Geologic history shows us that.

Or stranger still perhaps the life on our world is the extension of life born somewhere else. We’re the outermost reach of some far flung alien spore, with a long, tenuous thread stretching out for light years to some remote part of the Milky Way.

That’d be something.