Nature seems to be designed just for us.

First, it's important to acknowledge that nature would exist just fine without us. Life, on a lower scale, would go on: everybody eating everybody else, all bent on just surviving. But how long can a system like that survive? And why?

It takes human intelligence to make sense of it all, right? Or not. Maybe we flatter ourselves. But really, wouldn't it be ultimately kind of boring if mindless creatures just kept eating each other or spent all their time trying not to be eaten?

At some point in "The Great Scheme of Things", human intelligence comes into play. Creatures evolve who don't want just to chase down other beings for food but who want to explore the world, to travel, eventually to learn how to grow things, and to seek out mates who aren't just like us but who may be, in subtle ways, different from us.

Picture yourself as a primitive human, not so long removed from the jungle or the savanna, where you had to track down and kill animals to survive. You brought back to your cave or your settlement whatever you'd killed, and your women had to butcher it and cook it over a campfire built of whatever wood they could scavenge. Not a pretty life.

But suppose that at night, when all had eaten and the young ones were sleeping, in whatever shelter you'd managed to scrape together, you and your missus lay back and looked up at the stars. What a wonder they must have seemed! Spread out against the sky, all those points of light, obviously far away: what did they mean?

In one sense, they meant nothing. They were and are just stars in the night sky. But a primitive imagination -- the first sparks of human intelligence -- assigned them meaning. Hey, what else was there to do with budding intelligence in those long ago days? Thus were born Orion and the Big Dipper and all the other constellations. Do they really mean anything? Probably not. But they were manisfestations of the dawning of our understanding of who we were.

Fast forward to today. Take a drive through the Colorado Rockies and gaze upon those peaks filled with pristene snow. Rent a car and drive the coastline of California, north from L.A., all the way having your breath taken away by the ocean breaking on the bluffs. Spend a fall in New England and see the trees break into a color show that you have to take pictures of so you'll remember it and be able to show your relatives who haven't been there. Or take a tour of the South when the flowers start to come out in early spring: you thought you went to Alabama or Texas or even New Orleans for the music and the food, but the flowers do you in.

From the stars overhead to the flowers under our feet, from the peaks of the Rockies to the ocean pounding the cliffs in California, nature seems designed to entice our senses, but we know this can't be true, since all these natural phenomena would exist even if humans didn't.

So why is all so pleasing to us humans? Why do we travel so many miles every year to see the ocean and the mountains and the flowers and the trees: the magnificent redwoods, the live oaks with their spreading limbs, the last proud giant elms? Why are we so enthralled with the way out country looks? The way the world looks? Why this fascination with nature?

Because, for whatever reason, the physical world is configured in a way that appeals to our senses. It may be an accident, but what an accident that would be!

My suspicion is that it's all of a piece: that the physical world is what it is -- whether we're in it or not -- but that we are built to appreciate it, to revere it, to render it as art, to soak it up and marvel at it. Why? I'll leave that to wiser men and women.

In the meantime, could you take a picture of me and my family in front of this geyser?