The Gaians are informed in all things by the last days of Earth: overcrowded, over-engineered, overbuilt, over-everything. To call them environmentalists would be to understate the case; to call them radical would only approximate the extent of their environmentalist roots. Earth is dead, and if the same fate is to be avoided on Chiron, the best way to go about it is to ensure that the lessons of home are applied early and well. Or, in the words of the leader quote:

In the great commons at Gaia’s Landing we have a tall and particularly beautiful stand of white pine, planted at the time of the first colonies. It represents our promise to the people, and to Planet itself, never to repeat the tragedy of Earth.

– Lady Deirdre Skye, “Planet Dreams”

It is important to note that this is not a disavowal of either technology or survival. The least disruptive thing humans could do to Chiron would be to simply not arrive. Given that this is not an option, however, the next best thing is to take the lessons of history to heart and apply them right from the start. Now that humanity has been given a new beginning, how can it go about using this new opportunity without – to use the least poetic words imaginable – fucking up from the word go?

This ambition gives the Gaians a very hands-on approach to ecology. Not only in terms of understanding it (they begin with the knowledge of how to build terraformers) but also in all other important aspects of a colonial society. How do you build a base without wasting resources on inefficient and redundant infrastructure? How do you streamline a supply chain so as to avoid waste and loss of resources? How do you emulate the ruthless efficiency of ecological processes in an all-too human economy? These are questions that the Gaians have taken to heart, and whose answers are visible in every aspect of their society.

There is an old adage that the status quo has the advantage over any proposed change, in that it does not have to justify itself; given that the status quo is the status quo, it is already in place, and thus it continues to be unless something dramatic happens. It therefore becomes of paramount importance to shape the initial conditions so as to foster a status quo which promotes the desired outcomes. Or, in other words, it is easier to have always been attuned to the processes of ecology than to retool an entire society after it has established entirely different values and traditions over the course of years and decades. If you build it right from the start, it will remain right; the virtues of habit and routine will ensure that the built up momentum will keep going.

This, more than anything else, is what sets the Gaians apart. If need be, they can build a technological and industrial powerhouse to rival all of the other factions. But they do so from a point of view of efficient environmentalism – Gaian tech will be rooted in ecological sensitivity, and Gaian factories will always be less polluting than their rival counterparts. But there will still be factories. The ambition is not to not be human, but to be human as sustainably as possible. Earth still lingers in humanity’s memory, whether the other factions want to admit it or not.

The name ‘Gaia’ is a reference to the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that planetary ecosystems form a self-regulating whole that in various ways seeks to secure the conditions for its own survival. On Earth, this is but a hypothesis, which needs to be substantiated with more data; on Planet, this is a literal truth, which unequivocally manifests in the form of mind worms relentlessly attacking those factions who engage in heavy pollution. Given that this was not known by the colonists upon arrival, this is something of a coincidence; given that Alpha Centauri is a work of fiction, and that there are no coincidences in works of fiction, there is an element of foreshadowing at work here. History is, as always, also future.

All of this sets the Gaian up for the advent of human transcendence. Having spent centuries studying and adapting to the ecological realities of Planet, the step to merge with it is not far off. Gaian transcendence would not push Planet this way or that, but rather introduce post-humanity as an always-already integral part of the emerging planetary consciousness. Humanity, informed by the loss of one home world, would finally return home.