Heroes Not Zombies

Emanuele Coccia, the Italian philosopher who brings a new and refreshing perspective to the life by considering plant life says that what plants do so well is capture “extraterrestrial light” and turn it into energy and forms.

Two things struck me when I first heard him say that – “extraterrestrial light”? What’s that? Well it’s the light which comes from outside of the Earth isn’t it? Natural light. The light of the Sun, and the light of stars. The light of the moon is reflected light, so is just another dimension of the light of the Sun.

Without this “extraterrestrial light” from the Sun there would be no Life on Earth. Plants are THE way of transforming light into energy. We get all the energy we need by consuming other life forms at different stages on the food chain, but all of what we eat has plant life at its core. We fundamentally consume the light of the Sun through plants. Maybe through some animals we eat, but they do didn’t capture the energy directly from the Sun. All animals get all the energy they need AFTER the plants have captured it from the Sun.

The second thing which came to mind was Richard Feynman’s observation that trees make themselves “out of thin air“. That startling observation was based on the fact that trees capture carbon dioxide from the air, turn it into carbon based structures and emit oxygen as a “by product”. They also capture all the energy they need directly from the Sun using photosynthesis (a trick no animal ever managed to acquire!)

Then a third thing came to mind….the fact that we are all made from the atoms created in the stars. All the natural elements we find on Earth didn’t originate here. They originated in the great furnaces and explosions of distant stars millennia ago.

All of Life pursues this “extraterrestrial light” – all the plants, all the animals, all living creatures get the energy they need either directly from the Sun or indirectly through the consumption of other creatures which have already captured the sunlight.

Isn’t that a startling thought? That we are ALL light-seekers! All of us surviving and growing by finding and consuming the “extraterrestrial light”.