Fit Fitter Fittest

For hundreds of millions of years young Earth hurls through space,
revolving around what is a young and rather ordinary star. The
planet's stormy, poisonous atmosphere encloses the lifeless though
violent oceans and volcanoes composing its surface. Slowly through the
eons organic compounds consisting of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and
carbon accumulate all throughout the planet's surface by way of
regular, unexceptional chemical reactions. Lipids clump together to
form ionic membrane-like boundaries surrounding microscopic globules
of water. Amino acids string together to form peptide chains of all
shapes and sizes. Lifeless, passive collections of these organic
molecules appear at times to work together as if they constitute a
living thing. They begin swinging molecular hammers ever so
deterministically, ever so mechanically whenever the hammers so happen
to fall within their chemical grasp.

Suddenly, some such collection of molecules undergoes an astonishing
transformation! It replicates an identical copy of itself, a copy that
itself will replicate copies that will replicate copies that will
replicate copies and so on. Let there be life. And soon the planet is
swimming with it. Anywhere there is water, energy and a sufficient
buildup of spare organic parts, these microscopic nuisances enact
their tiny, deterministic wills upon the unsuspecting and virgin
planet. In an amount of time that is cosmically short, accomplished
through the intractability of exponential growth, the planet fills up.
No longer does there exist an abundant supply of free, unused
resources for new organisms' consumption. The once infinite
possibilities are made starkly finite, and survival becomes paramount.
These simplest of organisms unwillingly become players in the most
brutal of competitive games. And, by a cruel fate, the replication
process is error-prone, so not all copies are identical. Some copies
have a leg up, so to speak, on their competition, and they prosper
while the weaker ones are fated to starvation and death.
Differentiation occurs and accelerates. Organisms discover and cling
to any niche they can.

For another billion or two years the game plays on and these cellular
automatons slowly, incrementally advance ever more complicated
features: internal ones like DNA to replace its RNA predecessor, as
well as external ones like the complex ecological interdependencies
that form between the organisms. Yet in all these cells remain very
simple and are in fact not unlike what one day will be called
bacteria.

But again a momentous revolution occurs! Of all these cells, who have
proved for a thousand thousand thousand years their fitness and who
are descendants of innumerable generations of ever-improved, ever more
successful winners at the game, of all these cells one cell is a
specially erroneous copy of its parent. And it survives. It survives
and replicates, and its descendants exaggerate their uniqueness and
develop a radically more advanced internal structure. They form a
nucleus to protect better their precious blueprint. They become much
bigger in physical size. Some swallow alive other smaller cells that
convert the energy within sunlight into the high-energy carbon bonds
of sugars for storage. Others swallow cells that convert sugars into
the molecular energy currency of phosphorous bonds. Some cells begin
living together in colonies whereby no single cell can live
independently of the group. Some of the cells in these multicellular
globs begin to differentiate to carry out specific tasks, such as skin
cells to isolate the organism's orderly, safe inside from the chaotic,
murderous outside. They begin packing their DNA into separate strands
and innovate an entirely new form of replication that requires not
just one parent but mixes the traits of two. These new super-organisms
begin to advance much more rapidly. Entirely new species differentiate
within mere thousands of years as opposed to the typical millions
previously required.

And meanwhile the bacteria, once kings of the planet and penultimate
winners at the game, are now simplest of living things and are
relegated to eking out a survival in the most banal of niches: in
oceans eating the molecular scraps of the larger, more advanced
organisms; in the warm, fecund guts of multicellular hosts; and,
strangest of all, on the shiny metallic surfaces of the artificial
watering holes constructed by the latest-coming of the
super-organisms: a hairy, yapping ape that has proliferated to an
improbable number in a few ten thousands years' time.

These apes are not so special despite their oversized cortices, but to
their credit they manage to accomplish something no other terrestrial
organism had yet accomplished. They break free of Earth's atmosphere
and travel through the vacuum of space. They don't stray far, though.
After a few curious short test trips, they send a few of their kind to
the moon and return them to Earth safely. They make the trip a few
more times and then lose interest. They stay firmly rooted on Earth
and continue yapping and multiplying. More time goes by; the planet
blinks. Suddenly a vessel again rockets through the atmosphere, this
one much larger than any previous ones, past geosynchronous orbit,
past the moon, past the planets of the solar system, and through the
incomprehensible emptiness towards a nearby star. It's headed to the
nearest one with an orbiting planet containing sufficient quantities
of nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen and carbon to foster a
sustainable, earth-like ecosystem.

The starship is a colossal endeavor, a marvel of unparalleled
scientific and engineering achievement. Its development and
construction required coordinated efforts from millions of the apes,
and the dispute over the allocation of the vast resources needed for
its century-long voyage nearly caused the war that truly would end all
wars. But the apes persevered and their terrible sacrifices are
rewarded when the starship lands on the surface of its destination
planet exactly as planned. A small number of apes, the few lucky
enough to have been selected for this trip, descend from the ship out
onto the planet's surface, and not even their thick, protective
enviro-suits hide the hope and optimism they feel. These space-apes
are one-way passengers in the most extraordinary and desperate of
explorations yet made. The necessity of their success on this new
world is made all the more real because during their slumbering
voyage, terrestrial-apes continued in their increasing struggle within
an ecosystem made hopelessly, horribly different from the one around
them ten thousand years ago, the one to in which the apes are genetically
suited to live. Increasingly more resources became necessary just
to maintain the established population, and decreasingly does
once-bountiful Earth proffer the resources to her once (self-presumed)
most-blessed of species. Amid the furious competition for declining
resources, chaos erupts followed quickly by strife. Terrestrial-apes
turn against themselves and mutually assure their own destruction.
Space-apes are now the only future.

But New Earth proves to be harsher and less tamable than expected, and
the space-apes fall behind schedule in their ten-year
Xeno-Sustainability Project. They continue living past the scheduled
completion date on dwindling resources in what were intended to be
temporary enviro-cities but now appear to be tombs, all while the
terraforming efforts continue to fail due to unforeseen problems with
chemical compositions deep within the rocks and oceans. Despite the
noblest of efforts, the space-apes inevitably out-consume their
initial stocks and artificial syntheses while futilely, desperately
deviating from the great plan that terrestrial science so carefully
and so hopefully theorized and developed and simulated and tested over
a hundred years ago. And so amid their own furious competition for
resources, space-apes too begin to turn on themselves and mutually
assure their own destruction.

Unlike on Old Earth, each of the space-apes' evolutionary cousins --
the food-giving plants, the ecologically necessary though unpleasant
insects, the birds and the fellow mammals -- all the cryogenically
frozen specimens of this futuristic ark that were to seed New Earth
with plentiful life, all are totally dependent upon space-ape for
their initial survival until the completion of the now failed
Xeno-Sustainability Project, and so they too perish. All die out but a
few species of a kind of such lesser standing that, almost as an
afterthought to the space-ape, just happened to catch a ride to this
strange new world. They are the long-forgotten bacteria, our
languishing prokaryotes, relegated to thankless tasks such as helping
space-ape digest the foods he eats. Filling thousands of niches here
and there, assumed and taken for granted, these tiny organisms
survived for billions of years but seemingly were left behind in the
game for half that duration. But they're adaptable and require minimal
resources, and, although thoroughly alien, this new planet presents
merely a different set of niches to fill. Again the bacteria best at
surviving win out against the lesser ones, and again the strongest
become champions of that most sought after of prizes: the passing down
of those precious As and Ts and Gs and Cs to next generation. These
bacteria multiply and soon break free of the boundaries of the now
lifeless enviro-cities and spread out among the planet's unsuspecting,
half-terraformed landscape.

And soon New Earth is swimming with them.