Life is Death

When I was at the Tellus Science Museum today, I had some sort of epiphany, which I'm sharing below:

I think our genetic programming goes back to when the very first cell reproduced, 2.5 billion years ago. After the Earth cooled and began to stabilize, it took a billion years to somehow achieve life. But the day that life reproduced was the beginning of the end.

Sure, life gave us an atmosphere with oxygen, but it also gave us a predisposition to horde. Even the one-celled animals try to get all the resources they can, so that they can reproduce. One-celled animals become larger and more complex because there is an evolutionary advantage for doing so. Dinosaurs grew from lizards because it made them more competitive -- they could now reach higher leaves or become more efficient hunters.

Life is amazing, but also self-destructive. Five million years ago a life form evolved that used tools to suppress its competitors. This same animal is still around today, extracting minerals, raising crops, and creating a highly complex society that simply expands, and can never go back. Even if humans fail to consume the Planet, some other creature will. We flatter ourselves and think we are are special, but we are simply a host for evolving viruses. So, really, it's a race to the bottom between ravenous humans and ever-evolving influenza strains.

And let's put political correctness aside for a moment and talk about soft environmentalism -- you know, the kind that Gore and Kennedy push. The fact is that if we convert to clean energy, that will only pave the way for more human population growth. In reality, Peak Oil is the best thing that could ever happen to Earth, as it will remove one blight, but surely another blight will rise.

So, as for Daniel Quinn, myself, and the many others who would like to "Save the World," well, we are up against the very process of life itself. For life lives, grows, multiplies, and compounds, until there is no life. And if one life form fails in this goal, another steps in to complete the job.

This bare truth may live in the back of our heads, but we bury it with our cultural lies, and our lies become so ingrained that they eventually become our truth. Furthermore, by our early 20s, our lies are hardwired into our brains. It's like my Christian fundamentalist siblings, who try to force science into their archaic religious beliefs, and though they always can, they sound like idiots. For example, my bother tells me that dinosaurs and humans lived together 6,000 years ago. And no amount of logic or evidence will change him, because in his mind, to doubt or question would piss off God, and no one wants to do that.

I believe that the bipedal primates, the ones who invented agriculture and industry, and then used these tools to destroy the Planet in just a few millenniums, are about to play out. I had deeply hoped that our destiny would be to colonize the Universe, but we seem to have our priorities really wrong, and we can't seem to break away from the role that life itself has created for us.

Life is death, for life consumes all resources and brings an end. Evolution is only a temporary anomaly in the Universe that occasionally flares up on planets with stable orbits and plentiful water.