In October 2025, Climate Central published an update to its database of "billion-dollar disasters" in the United States—a project it took over after NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) temporarily suspended its operations in May 2025.

In this update, Climate Central identified 14 events that occurred between January and June 2025, with estimated losses of US$101.4 billion. In addition to a series of severe storms, wildfires in the Los Angeles area stand out with direct losses exceeding US$60 billion.

Earth.org echoed the same figures. There is no doubt about the message for all countries: physical risk has become financial risk. These events, with an irreparable cost to the lives of millions of people, resulted in immense losses for sectors such as infrastructure, insurance, and credit.

In November 2025, COP30 arrived in the Amazon, in Belém, Pará, after two years in countries deeply dependent on oil. In the search for a way to reduce fossil fuels without sacrificing growth and energy security , different voices debated priorities.

Among these voices, the indigenous peoples recalled something fundamental: standing forests, water, soil, and biodiversity are not "identity issues." They are strategic national assets.

Thirty-three years after the 1992 Earth Summit (Eco-92), the planet has already reached the political limit of the Paris Agreement .

According to Copernicus and the WMO, 2024 was the first calendar year in which the global average temperature was above 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial period.

Brazil has undeniable credentials to lead the environmental agenda, namely: relatively clean energy , a highly productive agro-industry, and the largest stock of biodiversity on the planet.

Leading here doesn't mean kneeling before anyone, but transforming competitive advantage into prosperity. This is a fundamental issue for us Brazilians.

The year 2025 also ends with secondary and private stock transactions of SpaceX , transactions that value the company at US$ 800 billion.

There is speculation that SpaceX may seek an IPO in 2026, with expectations of raising US$25 billion at a valuation of around US$1.5 trillion.

Is humanity betting on conquering space?

There is nothing wrong with technological ambition. Space innovation drives science, defense, communications, and productivity. The contrast is another: we are capable of investing in the extraordinary, but we hesitate to fund the essential.

We run the risk of repeating, in outer space, a short-term logic of predatory extraction, as we have done so many times on Earth.

It was by observing this contrast that I came across the book The Awakening of the Conscious Universe: A Manifesto for the Future of Humanity , by Marcelo Gleiser, a Brazilian theoretical physicist, astronomer, and writer born in Rio de Janeiro in 1959.

Published in 2024, this short and powerful book allows a layperson like myself to understand, with some dignity, what science already knows, and what it still doesn't know, about the Universe.

"Mediocrely average"

When Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) "displaced" the Earth from the center of the Universe, something "broke" in the human psyche.

The idea that we are "mediocrely ordinary" in the cosmos amplifies our drama: we are not the center, we are peripheral. The universe is vast, cold, indifferent, and doesn't know we exist.

This gave rise to what we call "Copernican Nihilism"—or the Principle of Mediocrity . Max Weber (1864-1920) used the term "disenchantment of the world" to describe how modern science has removed the magic and sacred mystery from the planet, in what has become known as the loss of the pre-Copernican vision.

The irony is that, from a scientific point of view, the periphery has become abundance. The Kepler probe, launched in March 2009 to continuously observe around 150,000 stars, showed us how common planets are and how gigantic the "inventory of the possible" is.

The Kepler probe confirmed the existence of 2,720 exoplanets, revolutionizing our understanding of stellar systems, as well as identifying rocky worlds in zones with the potential for liquid water. By December 2024, more than 7,387 exoplanets had been confirmed, many of which are in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

With the benefit of all this knowledge, the writer Gleiser shows us in his work that, with at least 100 billion stars and up to a trillion planets, the Milky Way is a vast factory of possibilities.

It is estimated that there are around 3 billion rocky planets orbiting in the so-called habitable zone, a figure which, in light of the Principle of Mediocrity , suggests that life, at least in simple forms, should be common in the galaxy.

After all, our Sun, a G-type star, is just one of 7 billion similar stars scattered throughout the galactic disk.

With at least 100 billion stars and up to a trillion planets, the Milky Way is a vast factory of possibilities.

Given the magnitude of these numbers, Gleiser emphasizes the exception: Earth. He justifies his assertion by explaining that complex life requires a rare combination of a protective magnetic field, sufficiently stable tectonics, a proportionally large Moon, and resilience in surviving mass extinctions. Even with billions of "candidates," the sequence of necessary conditions seems improbable.

Here comes the echo of Ward and Brownlee, in Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe .

Ward and Brownlee argue that perhaps the true miracle is not the existence of "life" somewhere, but the existence of "complex life" and, derived from this, consciousness. Between the ocean of possibilities and the island of consciousness, we continue to inhabit a pale blue dot that may be, for a long time, the only stage for intelligence in the visible universe.

Given these facts, the question changes: what is our role as intelligent life? Does it make sense for us to be responsible for turning Earth into a planet like all the others, rocky and devoid of complex life?

Perhaps our true and only mission is to care for life on Earth and, therefore, for its biodiversity in all its forms. Gleiser calls this biocentrism.

I understand it as a principle of responsibility, not as a worship of nature or a license for authoritarianism. I support the idea that lasting human prosperity depends on keeping alive the systems that sustain our existence: water, soil, climate, biodiversity. We would measure our "Progress" primarily by what we preserve.

Perhaps, when the most relevant "IPO" ceases to be SpaceX's and becomes Earth's "IPO," the sadness, weariness, and discouragement of the human condition in a world that has become dystopian at the beginning of the 21st century will lessen.

Ensuring the resources necessary to sustain life, through preservation, restoration, adaptation, science, territorial protection, regenerative agriculture, sanitation, food, education, housing, etc., has become essential in order to protect all living beings, whether plant or animal.

This is not about "selling the planet." We need to recognize that without continuous investment in Earth's natural capital, there is no reason for our species to exist.

Fersen Lambranho is the chairman of the boards of directors of GP Investments and G2D Investments.