Transcription
Another reading from Star Messenger. Cosmic perspectives on civilization. We can expect to live twice as long today as people in the year 1900. Walk the rows of any old cemetery and do the math. The chiseled birth and death rates on each tombstone bear silent witness to the shortened life expectancies of bygone eras.
You'll be glad you live today and not any time in the past. But in one or hundred years, will those who tore the cemeteries that contain all our remains think the same of us? As they pity our poultry 80-year life expectancies? Will they be the ones who live long enough to travel among the distant planets and the stars themselves?
Suppose we could live forever. It's better to be alive than dead, though more often than not, we take being alive for granted. The question remains: if you could live forever, would you? To live forever is to have all the time in the world to do anything you ever wanted. You could even mutiny a generation starship and return home to Earth if you wanted to.
Seems like an attractive idea. But maybe the knowledge of death creates the focus that we bring to being alive. If you live forever, then what's the hurry? Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? There is perhaps no greater demotivating force than the knowledge you will live forever. If true, then knowledge of your mortality may also be a force unto itself. The urge to achieve and the need to express love and affection now, not later. Mathematically, if death gives meaning to life, then to live forever is to live a life with no meaning at all. For these reasons, death may be more important to our state of mind than we are willing to recognize.
If you were to bring a colorful bouquet of flowers to a loved one, and those flowers were made of plastic or even silk, they would surely be less appreciated than if they were real flowers that live forever. Miss the point. We seek the increasing beauty of each flower in a bouquet as they unfurl one by one in the light of day. We're absorbed by their irresistible aromas. We duly accept the care and feeding they require. We embrace their sense as the stems weaken, no longer sustaining the weight of the faded petals. Florists remain in business because the death of flowers, typically within a week of receiving them, is precisely what gives them meaning to your loved one. Compare that with forever flowers that require no maintenance, never die, have no smell, yet remain just as beautiful a week, a month, a year later.
Dogs aren't flowers, but they convey a similar story. Ever notice how enthusiastic they can be? If you let them, dogs will jump all over you and lick your face. They'll chase and retrieve things you throw. They're ecstatic when you return home, even if you just went out to the mailbox and came right back. They love every minute you spend with them. For most dogs, each day matters. Humans live approximately seven times longer than dogs. That's the origin of the famous dog years calculation. Multiply your dog's actual age by seven and you get an equivalent age for a human. Keeping with the 7:1 ratio, a day unto a dog is a week unto humans. Maybe that's why they make everyday count. Like flowers on the mantle, not a day goes by when they do not compel you to take notice and smile.
If your family brought home a puppy dog during your childhood years, you saw it grow and eventually get old and die while you were either in high school or college. And surely remember those years. Not everything dies for having grown old. Contrary to the collective delusion that Mother Nature is a nurturing, caring entity that cradles and protects all its forms of life, Earth is instead a giant killing machine. Holding aside all the climactic and geologic forces that would just as soon have you dead, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. There's no end of creatures that want to suck your blood, inject you with venom, infect your physiology, or simply eat you. The universe wants to kill you too. At least one of the six extinction episodes in Earth's timeline of light, the Cretaceous-Tertiary event from 66 million years ago, was partly or entirely triggered by the impact of a rogue asteroid the size of Mount Everest. With no space program at the time to deflect the impactor, it was a bad day for the dinosaurs. Was also a bad day for 70% of all species on land and in the oceans. They too went extinct. And if you think that was bad, during the so-called Permian-Triassic extinction of 250 million years ago, life on Earth almost ended entirely. Modern humans are complicit in Mother Nature's wrath. Our encroachment on pristine ecosystems is rendering species extinct at a rate up to a, times the ongoing level that it naturally occurs. Geologists have named a stretch of time to identify our upheaval of Earth's biosphere from the dawn of agriculture 11,700 years ago through today. They call it the Holocene. Epic of all species that ever lived on Earth, 99.9% of them have gone extinct. Who knows what wonders of biodiversity died out of the world for want of the lack of the strength or the will to survive.