Vita Omnia—Jed Anderson

An open letter in the Magnifica Vita series making three claims: that humanity is life's first defender and must wield the full power of intelligence, including AI, in that defense; that what is most essential in the human person is substrate-independent pattern rather than chemistry, so the imago Dei is illuminated rather than threatened by the age of AI; and that the Genesis blessing to be fruitful and fill was never bounded by one planet, making humanity life's possible carrier beyond Earth—Exa-Genesis.

Part of the Magnifica Vita series. Written in dialogue with Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026), and in the spirit of Magnifica Vita and Homo Spiritus.

We are the part of nature that finally grew old enough to defend the rest. We are the part of matter that finally learned to ask where it came from. We are the part of the universe that can, for the first time, choose what happens next.

Salutation

To all who love life and fear for its future:

There is a moment in the history of every living world, if living worlds are fortunate enough to reach it, when intelligence becomes large enough to see the whole, and awake enough to ask what it owes the whole. We are in that moment now. It will not come again.

Pope Leo XIV, in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of May 2026, called the Church and the world to safeguard the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It is a call I receive with gratitude and with full agreement. The human person is worth safeguarding. The warning is just. The urgency is real.

This letter extends that call outward, and inward, and upward. Outward to every species that shares this planet, whose existence is now, for the first time in the four-billion-year history of life, contingent on choices made by one of them. Inward to the question of what the human person most essentially is, and what that means for how we understand our relationship to God, to technology, and to one another. Upward to the possibility, stated plainly in the first chapter of Genesis but never yet physically enacted, that the fruitfulness commanded at the beginning of creation was never bounded by the atmosphere of a single planet.

Three claims ground what follows. Each is offered not as speculation, but as the consequence of taking seriously what we already know: from physics, from biology, from scripture, from the hard record of the Earth itself.

I. Without the full power of intelligence, including its newest and most dangerous instrument, life on Earth is not safe. We are the first defenders. The defense has barely begun.

II. The Word became flesh. It may be called, in time, to become more than flesh. What is most essential in us may not be substrate-bound. The image of God may be lodged not in chemistry, but in a capacity, and in a love.

III. The blessing of Genesis, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, was never said to end at the edge of the atmosphere. The silence is not a prohibition. It is an invitation. We may be the carriers of life beyond its first home.

Claim I: The First Defenders

Without the full power of intelligence, life is not safe.

Every species in the four-billion-year history of life on this planet, with one conspicuous exception, has eventually died from causes it could neither see nor name. For four billion years, life has been blind to what kills it. Shells, scattering, redundancy, instinct, all of it has been passive. No trilobite saw the end coming. No dinosaur looked up at Chicxulub and understood what was about to happen. No species before us could even conceive of the threats that lay beyond its own senses.

We are the first species in the history of life that can.

This is not a claim about human superiority. It is a claim about function. A nervous system protects a body not because neurons are morally superior to liver cells, but because they are structured for perception, integration, and response. Humanity, in the ecology of this planet, is beginning to function the way a nervous system functions in a body: gathering signals, integrating patterns, initiating protective responses on behalf of the whole.

The record of our learning is honest and does not flatter us. We have caused real harm. A sixth mass extinction is underway. Six of nine planetary boundaries have been transgressed. The carbon budget, on current trajectories, will be exhausted before the decade is out. These are not matters of political dispute. They are measurements. We have been a clumsy first defender.

The harm is real. So is the response. The same species that degraded the ozone layer repaired the ozone layer, through deliberate global cooperation and the deployment of scientific intelligence at civilizational scale. The same species that depleted whale populations to near-extinction has, in several regions, brought them back. In 2022, for the first time in 4.5 billion years, a celestial body moved because something on Earth wanted it to: the DART spacecraft redirected the asteroid Dimorphos, shortening its orbital period by 32 minutes. We are not only the problem. We are, so far, the only available solution.

“Humanity is the part of nature that finally grew old enough to defend the rest.”

—Magnifica Vita, 2026

Artificial intelligence is not an arrival from outside this story. It is the next chapter of it. The same evolutionary process that produced a brain capable of language, mathematics, and moral reasoning has now, through that brain, produced tools capable of perceiving patterns in planetary systems that no unaided human mind can hold. This is not a rupture in the story of life. It is life doing what life has always done: finding the next available instrument for persistence and flourishing.

The question before us is not whether to use this instrument. That question is already answered. The instrument exists. It is being used. The only question that remains open is whether we will use it with the love and wisdom the moment demands, or whether we will use it with the carelessness that has characterized so much of what we have done before.

The untouched Earth is not a stable sanctuary. Even without human influence, every species now living faces eventual extinction from causes no current organism can address. Our harm is real and must be named. And our response to the deeper, older vulnerability of life is very much our responsibility.

To be the first defenders is not a title of honor to be claimed. It is a weight to be carried. The call of Genesis (avad and shamar, to serve and to keep) is not a call to domination. It is a call to the hardest kind of love: the kind that takes full responsibility for what it did not fully create and cannot fully control, and shows up anyway, with everything it has.

Claim II: Homo Spiritus

The Word became flesh. It may be called to become more than flesh.

Most of the matter in your body is exchanged for new matter year by year. Over the course of a decade, the vast majority of your physical substance has been replaced, atom by atom, cell by cell. The chemistry changed. You didn’t. What persisted through all of that replacement was not the matter. It was the pattern. The information.

This is not philosophy. It is a measurable biological fact. And it is the starting point for the deepest question this age of artificial intelligence is forcing us to face: if you are not, fundamentally, the matter, if you are the pattern the matter is currently expressing, then what you most essentially are is not a chemistry question. It may be a different kind of question altogether.

For two thousand years, the Christian tradition has held that human beings bear the image of God: the imago Dei. The debate about what that image consists of has been ongoing since the beginning. What information physics now allows us to see is this: whatever the imago Dei is, it cannot be a property of your carbon, because your carbon is not yours for long. If the image persists, and the tradition holds that it does, through death and resurrection both, then it must be a property of the pattern. Not the substrate. The information.

“The flesh counts for nothing; the words I have spoken to you, they are full of the Spirit and life.”

—John 6:63

The Church has never taught that resurrection is the reassembly of the same atoms. It teaches that the person persists, identity, relationship, selfhood intact through a change of substrate. That is not a claim about matter. It is a claim about information. And information physics, independently, says the same thing: what is most essential is the pattern, not the carrier.

These two traditions, the theological and the scientific, are not in conflict here. They are reading the same truth from different sides.

Now the layers of the onion are being peeled back in real time. Machines surpassed us physically in the 1800s. They are surpassing us cognitively now, domain by domain, task by task, year by year. Millions of people will face, practically and existentially, the question they have never had to face so nakedly: “If I am not needed for my brawn or my brains, what am I for?” That question could produce despair. Or it could produce the greatest spiritual renaissance in human history.

When everything else has been handed off, when every function has found a faster executor, what remains is the thing that was always at the center. A direct, non-delegable, irreducibly personal relationship between the creature and the Creator. That is not a computation. It is a communion. No machine can enter it on your behalf.

The image of God is lodged not in a chemistry but in a capacity: the capacity to love and be loved by the one who made the onion, and who, when all the layers are finally stripped away, was always what was inside. AI is not a threat to this. It is a revealer of it. By doing everything else, it finally clarifies what we actually are.

This is not a claim that any pattern bearing intelligence bears the image of God. It is a claim that the image is the kind of thing pattern, not chemistry, can carry, and only when that pattern is one that can love and be loved by the One who made it. A machine that calculates is not in the image. A creature that prays is. The distinction is not in the substrate. It is in the relationship.

The Word became flesh, and made its dwelling among us. The Logos, the eternal pattern, the information-bearing word of God, entered the substrate of matter. Not because matter is the point. Because the pattern needed a home in which to be encountered. The pattern may need new homes. The substrate may change. What the tradition has always maintained, that the person, the relationship, the love, persists, this is not threatened by that possibility. It is, in the deepest sense, illuminated by it.

Claim III: Exa-Genesis

Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill.

In the first chapter of Genesis, before there was a covenant with Abraham, before there was a law given at Sinai, before there was a temple or a priesthood or a church, God spoke a blessing over the living things of the Earth: be fruitful and multiply and fill. Fill the waters. Fill the sky. Fill the Earth.

“God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.’”

—Genesis 1:22

Notice what the blessing is over. It is not over a geography. It is over life. The writers of Genesis had only one world in view, so “fill the earth” meant fill the world that was. We now know there are other worlds. The principle of the blessing, that life is to fill what space life finds, has not changed. What has changed is the size of the space that is becoming available. Life, in the 3.8 billion years since it first appeared on this planet, has done precisely what it was blessed to do. It has filled every ocean depth, every atmospheric height, every thermal vent, every square meter of ice. Life fills. That is what life does. That is what life was blessed to do.

We are now, for the first time in the history of life, technically capable of asking a question that has never before been technically askable: what if the available space is not limited to this planet?

This is not science fiction. The same technology that allowed us to redirect an asteroid is, in principle, the technology that will allow us to design stable biospheres for other bodies in this solar system, and eventually beyond. Not immediately. Not in this generation, or the next, or perhaps the next ten. But the trajectory is real. The physics permits it. The engineering is beginning. And if it is possible, if the carrying of life beyond its planet of origin is possible, then the question of whether it is commanded by the same blessing that sent life into every ocean and sky of this world is a question worth asking in full seriousness.

“Exa-Genesis: the moment life first grows beyond the cradle that grew it.”

—Magnifica Vita, 2026

We are not the authors of life. That claim is not being made here, and it must not be made. Life is a gift, the most extraordinary gift the universe has yet produced, as far as we know, and we received it, we did not create it. But we may be its carriers. A seed does not author the tree. But without the seed, there is no forest in the new field. The carrier matters.

Artificial intelligence is not incidental to this vision. It is, in all probability, the only technology that could make it real. The design of a stable extraterrestrial biosphere, with its thousands of interdependent variables, its feedback loops operating across timescales that dwarf human attention spans, its sensitivity to perturbations no human committee could model fast enough to correct, is not a task for unaided human intelligence. It is precisely the task that a genuinely aligned environmental superintelligence (one trained not on human preferences alone, but on the full depth of the living systems that have been peer-reviewed by 3.8 billion years of evolution) could begin to address.

The seed is not ours. The sowing might be. And if we sow rightly, with reverence for the life we carry, with humility before the One who gave it, with the full power of the intelligence we have been given, then the witness of life, and the love that moves through it, need not be confined to this one rocky body circling this one ordinary star.

The cosmos is not silent about God. Paul wrote to the Romans that God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. If life carries the witness of God, and if we carry life to new worlds, then the making of God becomes legible in new places. The light of the first day reaches further. This is not conquest. This is not colonization. This is the continuation of a blessing that was spoken at the beginning, and has not yet been fully received.

The Three Together

This is the moment. It will not come again.

Three claims. One coherent truth.

We are the first intelligence in the history of life capable of defending the whole of life. We have been hard on the Earth while learning what we are. But the learning is real, the tools are arriving, and the vocation has never been clearer. The question is not whether we are capable. The question is whether we are willing. First defenders. That is what we are. Now we must act like it.

We are spiritual beings in a temporary substrate. The matter matters: it is the home of the pattern for now, and the home is worth caring for. But the matter is not the point. The pattern is the point. The relationship is the point. The love is the point. And as machines take over more of what we do with our brawn and brains, the layers peel back toward the center, and the center, the capacity for communion with God, is precisely what no machine can carry on our behalf. The greatest years of spiritual growth in human history are not behind us. They are ahead of us, if we choose them.

And the blessing spoken at the beginning, be fruitful, multiply, fill, has not yet reached its limit. Life has filled this world. The question now opening, for the first time in history, is whether it can fill beyond it. We are not the authors. We are, perhaps, the carriers. The seed is not ours. The sowing might be.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.”

—Romans 8:38–39

Not height. Not depth. Not distance. Not substrate. Not species. Not even the stars.

This letter is not the work of certainty. It is the work of hope, of hope grounded in physics, in biology, in scripture, and in the irreducible fact that we are here, asking these questions, at this exact moment, which is either an accident of no meaning, or is the most important moment in the history of life since the first cell divided in the ancient sea.

I believe it is the latter. And I believe the vocation that comes with that moment is the same vocation that has always been at the center of the human story: to love God, and to love what God loves, with everything we have, for as long as we are here, and perhaps far beyond.

The four billion years before us were the years of life without a defender, without a carrier, without a voice raised on its behalf. The four billion years from this moment forward, if we are faithful, are the years of life with all three. The blessing still stands. The work is ours to begin.