The meaning of Life...

In the July edition of Scientific American there is an interview with Alan Weisman, author of five books, about his upcoming new publication "The World without us" (St.Martin's Press, 2007). In this book Weisman analyses what would happen under the hypothesis that the human race, all of a sudden, ceases to exist entirely (no single human left on the planet) from a given moment onwards until the end of time!

It's an interesting analysis... he deals from the next few days after the event to trillions of years afterwards. He starts with a description of what will happen to Manhattan, as an example, by using established knowledge about the existing infrastructure (subways, buildings, streets and avenues), and the backgound nature upon which human made infrastructure is built (bedrocks, underground rivers and streams, valeys and hills, woods and living creatures other than human, etc). His conclusions are simply plausible because they are based on known facts about the state of things in the current eco system. Nevertheless his conclusions sound surprising because, although we know most of the things he describes, we simply never took the time to perform the thought exercise.

So it appears that an immense amount of water in the tens of thousands of metric tons needs to be pumped away daily to keep the Manhattan subway rails dry and therefore, when no humans are available to care for the nuclear plants suplying electric energy, reactors simply shut down for security reasons, electricity supply stops, pumps work no more and the subway tunnels get filled with water within a matter of days... Streaming underground water causes further a number of the big avenues to collapse, like the Lexington and Madison avenues, and so on... A marvel of a book this promises to be.

Having seen the SciAm article and reading about some of the future events Weisman describes made me think a little...

We are told by scientists that the current universe, our own, in all its immensity has an approximate age of 14.5 Billion years since the Big-Bang, the moment of Creation. Not bad at all... Our own planetary system around our sun and our planet Earth in particular were found to have an age of one third of the above, say about 4.5 Billion years. First substances contributing to the creation of life appeared soon after the formation of the earth crust 3.5 Billion years ago, whereas humans, as we know them, appeared thru evolution of initial life forms with a reproduction capability only in the last hundreds of thousands years, not millions though (I think). Let's state that humans communicating among themeselves by means of some form of comprehensive "language", living within "organized" communities and creating objects that are samples of human civilatization have existed for tens of thousands of years... still a very small percentage compared to the age of the planet, let alone the age of the universe...

Weisman, reflecting contemporary scientific knowledge, predicts that in a billion years the earth would have theoretically reached temperature levels in which no human life would be still possible... I strongly believe human civilizations will have ceased to exist long before then with probably Star Trek like reps of the human race attempting to colonize new planetary systems in outer space (not too successfully, I suppose). However, for the sake of such broad assumpions, let's say that the timespan in the life of the Earth during which we, humans, inhabited the planet, is definitely not longer than a few hundreds millions years (broad upper bound)...

After 5 billion years from the Present time (AP) the earth will gradually evaporate as a result of an expanding sun that will eventually absorb all of its planets into one fluid and gazeous mass. In other words, the total length of physical existence of our own planet as an independent space object is not going to be much more than 10 Billion years, from beginning to end. That means that intelligent life on Earth, from its cradle to the grave, will have eventually existed for much less than ten percent of the Earth's life. And all this under the assumption that no other cause, man-made or natural, would have wiped out all forms of intelligent life on Earth long before the Billion years AP mark.

If you now think about our known history of civilization, say the last 4 to 5 thousand years BP (Before Present), we realize that what we think as an immense timespan, from the Egypt pyramids to the next 100 thousand years, is a sub-percentual slice compared to the total age of our planet.

So, why all the bother? Why the wars, domination of one group of persons upon others, the build up of fortunes, monuments, landmarks, the fights about frontiers ringfenching inhabitable land... why religions and sciences, why should any God bother about each one of us at all... there are billions of us who would have lived during our slice of existence, all made of the same peta trillions of atoms and molecules that keep recycling from one object to another... why any God at all or law of nature governing the functioning of the Universe should care about so much "noise" anyways, "noise" of which a wee-tiny bit only maintains a form of intelligence for such a small slice in the life of one trivial and negligible planet like ours, as we know it, in a universe of trillions of similar planets who may have also housed during equivalent trivial percentages of their own lifespan intelligent humanoids like ourselves... no doubt there is (a) God in a form of some eternal (design) intelligence that is beyond and above time and space... but why should It care at all... To paraphrase Einstein: God appears to like humor and plays with dice afterall...

What's the point that I am trying to make, then, you may wonder?

Yesterday a dear friend and colleague lost a parent... I, myself, face the imminent risk of a similar loss in the near future of a close family member suffering a terminal desease. When I lost my own parents years ago, I learned to cope with it believing that our loved ones after they perish still continue to live further within ourselves and our children thru our cellular DNA code that we transmit from generation to generation thru the act of reproduction. I am just trying to make sense of it all... based on the elementary knowledge I have acquired during my lifetime about the meaning of things we see and live in.

My logic tells me to live life as long as I am still alive, learn from others, share my knowledge and do no evil... don't bother much about facing my own death anyway and hope little about what happens next, after I am gone for ever... who cares anyway? All what we shall have built and done during the less than 10% of our Earth's lifespan will perish long before all disappears for good again in our solar system's ultimate explosion when the sun turns into a red dwarf... in 5 Billion years from now.