My musings on the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

This New Years Day 2023.

What are we. A clump of evolutionary organised carbon based molecules on an insignificant lump of rock orbiting an average star in an average galaxy in an indeterminate expanse of space time. Confined as we are to a thin crust of rock in a paper thin spherical shell of atmosphere, temporarily sidestepping the constraints of entropy within a localised region of space time.

We are brought into existence from star dust, grow mature and pass through countless cycles of love, hope,  joy and despair then return to the star dust from whence we came. The final battle by homeostasis lost. Within our narrow window of consciousness we travel from oblivion to oblivion buffeted about by random events and the decisions we make. Only during this short existence do we have an opportunity to influence the world in which we were born.

What is it all about. Is it just a consequence of the natural laws that govern all the universe. Are we an experiment in the cosmic laboratory. The universe came into existence from nothing, we are almost nothing and all will be returned, via the second law of thermodynamics, back to nothing. Our material remains recycled again and again by natural processes but our thoughts and memories that define who we are, our very essence, dissipated as heat fulfilling the most fundamental law of physics that entropy always increases.

No meaning, no reason, no purpose no pattern no anything. But many strive to look for a reason to exist, enveloping themselves in one of the multitude of religious convictions that buffer us from reality via a cloak of delusion. The basis of religion is deeply engrained in our DNA in the form of agentism. Assigning an agent to things we do not understand gave us a survival edge during the dark ages before the enlightenment of scientific advancement. Predominantly all religions going back at least five thousand years have been attributed to astronomical star alignments from the Egyptian sun god Horus right up to Jesus Christ. Essentially the same myth is copied over and over again spanning sixty or more religious belief systems.

What reason is there to go on. Most of the time I find it difficult to think of one. The only evidence that we ever existed is the indelible trace we leave in space time. World lines touch as we interact with others and occasionally entangle. We are given the ultimate privilege to ponder all the wonders of nature and the cosmos during our short existence, but so many are bogged down in their false mythological ideologies that this ultimate prerogative is wasted. To be so certain you are right in the face of so much evidence has caused unimaginable pain and suffering to so many throughout human history. The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain and this one thing causes us to cling onto life. Einstein famously said “those of us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Life itself is highly likely to be widely distributed throughout the universe. However, the fact that we have not been able to detect direct evidence via radio emissions suggests that once a civilisation has reached a certain level of technological advancement it very quickly brings about its own destruction, thus leaving the window of detection very narrow indeed. This suggests that there is a natural rhythm that permeates spacetime, biological life passing through various stages from inception to extinction over and over again but only once within each solar system. We are experiencing the beginning of the extinction phase on our own planet as this is being written.

Despite the incredible advances in physics that go a long way towards describing the structure of matter, that description only encompasses a mere 4% of what we know to be out there. We in reality know very little and so much is yet to be discovered, if indeed it is discoverable on the timescale available to us. We have hardly scratched the surface, the true nature of reality forever eludes us. Perhaps this is a good thing, always having a new frontier to challenge us.

There are possibly only two underlying incentives to persist. The first is to pass on our genes, a sort of diluted immortality. The second is a desire to leave the world in a better place than we found it at our birth. The first incentive we find all too easy to achieve but the second, apart from small locally confined successes, we are failing catastrophically to achieve on a global scale. The first incentive is the primary one, the second merely attempts to create a world in which our genes are more likely to survive and therefore the two are not truly independent. The selfish gene in action.

The energy/matter that was borrowed must be payed back.

We all live in the shadowlands, so deep that no matter how we strain our eyes we can never see the light.