Arsenal of Doom
Footballguy
I've been thinking a lot about the idea of Life recently. I was raised in a Methodist family so my early upbringing was grounded in mainstream Christianity but by the time I was a teenager I had started to read Joseph Campbell and was more interested in the overlapping aspects of human spirituality and how it has changed over time. I've gone back to Campbell at many times in my life and one of the things he said has always gripped me (many things really but among them), the idea that we are at a point where our knowledge of the universe has outgrown our myths. All the major religions of the world are based on the science of 2000 or so years ago, before almost anything we know about the universe today was accessible to our ancestors. Obviously science and religion have been at odds for most of that time, often in direct and bloody ways. Today millions of people try to reconcile religious beliefs that are incompatible with what we know to be scientific fact. Yet science still offers no or incomplete explanations for our existence, an idea or process that Campbell referred to as being Transparent to Transcendence or how we reconcile our place in the world/universe.
Another sort of of overarching theme of Campbell's work is the idea that you can view religions as being separate entities, or you can view them more holistically as part of an ongoing and evolving human experience going back to our earliest ancestors. Obviously the latter idea has always made more sense to me and more and more it shaping not just how I think about religion but about the nature of Life itself. Applying evolutionary principles I believe we can think about Life the same way. We aren't just a species that exists now but one part of a chain of life that goes back billions of years, possibly originating on this planet or perhaps from microscopic organisms floating around on comets throughout the universe. We'll probably learn more about that in our lifetimes.
So what does that say about us, and about Life if we are all part of the same chain of existence? Life itself seems rather odd. We know the universe is filled with matter and energy, and other more exotic forms of those that we know about through theory and more recently observation. It's not impossible to imagine a universe with matter and energy devoid of life, even if no one was around to appreciate it. In some ways it would make more sense, matter and energy obey specific laws that we can observe and name and generally behave in totally predicable ways. Life is somewhat unpredictable. The matter in our bodies obey all the physical laws of nature, and with enough observation it's probably fair to say life is predictable to a range of outcomes but within that there are thousands, millions, even billions of potential outcomes to consider. Why is that?
One conclusion I think we can safely draw from the history of studying Life on Earth is that the continuation of Life is a high priority. In fact if I had to make a statement on what I think the purpose of life is, that would be it. The purpose of Life is to perpetuate Life. The mechanism through which Life achieves that outcome is diversification. We exist today because Life, through a never-ending process of mutation, diversification, and migration. Life creates, it spreads, it survives by evolving into billions of forms. Life succeeds both by competing against and cooperating with other Life, but those processes are really just part of the same process of diversification.
Humans are part of that process but we are also clearly different from the rest of Life that we know about at this time in our history. We have an ability to process information to understand our environment, and shape it in ways that no other current species can and as far as we know these are capabilities that have never existed on our planet before. For me, this comes with an incredible sense of responsibility. Carl Sagan talked a lot about the paradox of Life in the Universe and one of his questions about why we haven't seen evidence of Life elsewhere, which mathematically we expect to be there. Is the question of whether or not once a species reaches a certain level of awareness it may consume itself before it can reach the stars. the capability to travel the stars and the capability to destroy all life are remarkably close and have developed on our planet in what amounts to a microsecond on the universal time scale.
I don't believe this is inevitable, that we are destined to destroy ourselves but the possibility is ever present. Of course Life would carry on, even if we wiped out millions of species on the way out with us, millions more would remain. But it seems we would be wasting the purpose we should be focused on. We have the capacity, more or less already or at least on the foreseeable horizon, to spread life from Earth into the Universe. To make Life survive beyond the time span of our own planet and star. That seems like a pretty amazing purpose and something worth living for, and something we can achieve if we embrace our own diversity and support the continued development of all human life.
I'm not sure there's really a point to writing all this. Just stuff I've been thinking about and figured this is a good place to drop it. All your jokes are welcome as are serious reflections if you are so inclined.
Another sort of of overarching theme of Campbell's work is the idea that you can view religions as being separate entities, or you can view them more holistically as part of an ongoing and evolving human experience going back to our earliest ancestors. Obviously the latter idea has always made more sense to me and more and more it shaping not just how I think about religion but about the nature of Life itself. Applying evolutionary principles I believe we can think about Life the same way. We aren't just a species that exists now but one part of a chain of life that goes back billions of years, possibly originating on this planet or perhaps from microscopic organisms floating around on comets throughout the universe. We'll probably learn more about that in our lifetimes.
So what does that say about us, and about Life if we are all part of the same chain of existence? Life itself seems rather odd. We know the universe is filled with matter and energy, and other more exotic forms of those that we know about through theory and more recently observation. It's not impossible to imagine a universe with matter and energy devoid of life, even if no one was around to appreciate it. In some ways it would make more sense, matter and energy obey specific laws that we can observe and name and generally behave in totally predicable ways. Life is somewhat unpredictable. The matter in our bodies obey all the physical laws of nature, and with enough observation it's probably fair to say life is predictable to a range of outcomes but within that there are thousands, millions, even billions of potential outcomes to consider. Why is that?
One conclusion I think we can safely draw from the history of studying Life on Earth is that the continuation of Life is a high priority. In fact if I had to make a statement on what I think the purpose of life is, that would be it. The purpose of Life is to perpetuate Life. The mechanism through which Life achieves that outcome is diversification. We exist today because Life, through a never-ending process of mutation, diversification, and migration. Life creates, it spreads, it survives by evolving into billions of forms. Life succeeds both by competing against and cooperating with other Life, but those processes are really just part of the same process of diversification.
Humans are part of that process but we are also clearly different from the rest of Life that we know about at this time in our history. We have an ability to process information to understand our environment, and shape it in ways that no other current species can and as far as we know these are capabilities that have never existed on our planet before. For me, this comes with an incredible sense of responsibility. Carl Sagan talked a lot about the paradox of Life in the Universe and one of his questions about why we haven't seen evidence of Life elsewhere, which mathematically we expect to be there. Is the question of whether or not once a species reaches a certain level of awareness it may consume itself before it can reach the stars. the capability to travel the stars and the capability to destroy all life are remarkably close and have developed on our planet in what amounts to a microsecond on the universal time scale.
I don't believe this is inevitable, that we are destined to destroy ourselves but the possibility is ever present. Of course Life would carry on, even if we wiped out millions of species on the way out with us, millions more would remain. But it seems we would be wasting the purpose we should be focused on. We have the capacity, more or less already or at least on the foreseeable horizon, to spread life from Earth into the Universe. To make Life survive beyond the time span of our own planet and star. That seems like a pretty amazing purpose and something worth living for, and something we can achieve if we embrace our own diversity and support the continued development of all human life.
I'm not sure there's really a point to writing all this. Just stuff I've been thinking about and figured this is a good place to drop it. All your jokes are welcome as are serious reflections if you are so inclined.
