Yes, I’m talking about testicles. Why do men have them?

My understanding has always been that it has to do with sperm motility, the ability of the sperm cells to spin their little tails and go swimming up the woman’s fallopian tubes to the egg. At normal body temperature, sperm cells are sluggish, and slow. They need to be slightly cooler than body temperature to really get spinning.

Hence, a hangy-down repository outside the body where they can cool off and get ready to go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fall of the United States, and the likely self-inflicted extinction of the human race (along with many, many other species), and it seems to me that testicles may be relevant.

I wrote about a book I read some time back, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal World, where the author made some rather startling observations about the world we live in. He made a suggestion at the very end of the book that caught my attention, a suggestion about reproduction.

To reprise, briefly, the author points out that pretty much the entire surface of the earth is awash in neurochemicals, and there are vast networks of bacteria, fungal celia, molds, and other living creatures that live in that soup of neurochemicals and demonstrably pass signals to each other, much like the individual brain cells in a mammal’s brain. There is every reason to believe that the earth, as a whole, could well be alive and intelligent. And like every living organism, it regulates its environment for its own purposes, and — ultimately — will seek to reproduce.

How does an entire planet reproduce?

When you look at how life on earth reproduces, it’s highly variable, intricate, and clever. Some yeasts have as many as fifty distinct sexes. Some living creatures ingest their mate. Some lay fertilized eggs, some lay eggs that must be fertilized after they are laid. Some cast sperm into the air, and let it land where it lands. Others have carrier species (like bees) to move their sperm to specific targets. Some just clone themselves.

There is no one model of reproduction on the earth.

When we look at the entire history of the earth in the geological record, we find that for a long time, it was very hot. Water was filled with organic sludge and creatures that ate the sludge, and creatures that ate the creatures that ate the sludge. Land creatures included the dinosaurs, but also vast quantities of plant matter.

It was all of that organic matter, absorbing sunlight and creating complex organic compounds that stored atmospheric carbon and the energy of the sun, falling to the ground and then getting compressed under layer after layer of its own descendants, that became the coal and oil we now burn and release back into the air as carbon dioxide.

And then the earth got cold and stayed cold. One might say, metaphorically, that the Gaian testicles dropped.

What came out of that shift was our modern world of ice ages, temperate climates, mammals, and human beings. And human being are … highly motile. We get around.

We’ve even launched ourselves to different planets in the solar system.

How does a planet reproduce?

One possibility is to use one of its species as a sperm cell — a carrier — to carry living matter and the Gaian genome to other worlds.

Humans, of course, think that it’s our job to reproduce ourselves on other planets: colonies on Mars, and Ganymede, and Europa, and ultimately, earth-like worlds outside the solar system. Glass domes and spacesuits, and all that.

But that’s a sperm cell’s viewpoint. From the larger viewpoint of the planet, the point is not to reproduce humans elsewhere, it is to reproduce Gaia elsewhere — which is an entire biosphere. As we’ve seen on earth, the biosphere is highly adaptable. It started in a methane atmosphere, then adapted to an atmosphere it had poisoned with toxic and corrosive oxygen. It thrives in undersea fumaroles at high temperature. It thrives in ice caves, and cracks deep beneath the surface of the earth. It thrives high in the atmosphere, and some of it can even go dormant and survive in space.

Humans cannot live on Mars. A properly-adapted biosphere probably could. If not Mars, perhaps Ganymede. Or high up in the clouds of Jupiter.

And if life is already there? Even better. The new life coming from Earth will share genetic material with the life already there, increasing genetic diversity, complexity, and the capacity to adapt.

What I’m suggesting is that humans may very well be a temporary species that formed in the cold earth cycle after the earth’s testicles dropped, and that it was always our job to use up stored energy-rich carbon compounds to propel us — as sperm, carrying the Gaian genome — to our neighboring planets. Perhaps, now, it is time for the testicles to be withdrawn back into the hot world, where organic sludge can accumulate solar energy and atmospheric carbon again and prepare for the next cold period, the development of another motile species, and another ejaculation into space.

I don’t know if this is a dark metaphor, or a bright one.

We humans like to think of ourselves as eternal, which is one of the few things we clearly are not. Life on earth has been around for over three billion years. Upright apes are only two million years old, modern humans only 200 thousand years old. Our technological world is less than two hundred years old. We are an eye-blink in the history of life on earth. A momentary squirt.

Now we’ve used up all of the stored carbon we depend on to run our civilization. By “used up,” of course, I don’t mean there is no more. By “used up,” I mean that we’ve passed the production peak, which means that for the first time in the history of oil production, the projected costs of production are going up instead of down. The oil that remains is increasingly harder to get to, and it takes more energy — in the form of burning oil — to get to it.

We would see this reflected in steadily rising oil costs in a sane economy, but our economy is not sane. So the thing to watch is the Ghawar fields in Saudi. Last time I checked, they were still at about $6/barrel for production cost, and the Saudis have apparently made a deliberate decision to hold market share by running at full production until the field is dry, keeping prices low and demand high and their pockets well-lined. When Ghawar shuts down — as it eventually must, though exactly when is an estimate that the Saudis don’t divulge — there will be a huge, disruptive spike in global oil prices. Venezuelan oil is one of the second-least expensive sources, at $20/barrel, so the shock could be a three-fold increase, virtually overnight; actually much higher, because there will be immediate scarcity driving prices up. Fracking comes in at over $40/barrel in the best cases and has no long-term future at all. The “drill, baby, drill” locations touted by US Republicans are purest political hokum: because of location, they would require decades of investment in infrastructure, which makes it far too expensive to ever sell that oil at usable prices.

Eventually — within the next two centuries — it will take more energy to get to the oil than we get out of the oil. Which is like paying $20 for a $10 bill: it makes no sense, even to stupid people, and while we’ll probably see some government subsidies that do the stupid for a while, those won’t last long, because there will simply be no demand for $100/gallon gasoline. The oil economy will shut down, and with it, our ability to boost out of the earth’s gravity-well in a continued ejaculation of Gaian seed to other planets.

Our usefulness as a species will end.

It’s hard to guess how long Gaia will keep us around after that usefulness ends. Maybe a few hundred thousand years, if we’re lucky — it would be a good run. Perhaps we’ll continue to develop technology based on something other than oil. Maybe — maybe — we’ll even stumble upon some “new physics” that lets us counteract gravity with something other than brute force, which would mean we haven’t yet reached our peak.

I wish I could see any of that in our future in our current global political climate. I don’t. I see a hard and fast fall.

But if we’ve accomplished our primary purpose, perhaps that’s … enough.