Mucks’ Minute #12

Old Muck’s Thoughts on Racial Responsibility and Immortality

“Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), Journal (May 1849)

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I love exploring chunks of my philosophy of life for it is not a simple thing to break apart ones’ own beliefs and have them all make sense.  It is actually the parts that make the sum of the person, initially formed in the phase change between childhood and maturity and repeatedly modified and morph’d throughout a persons’ life as he grows older; learns and relearns what is and is not important and what is and is not true.

A persons’ philosophy, when honestly exhibited and displayed for all to see is really a look into a man’s inner being; what is in his mind for certain.  Such a display of honesty will be both self-centered and egotistic after all, in this case at least it’s my mind we’re talking about, so take that into consideration while reading this.

I believe in one basic thing. A man’s mind holds the essence of that person, who he is, who he was, and who he will be.  Mind is simply all there is to define a person.  When the mind no longer functions, the essence of that person is gone.  The mind is where you live.

Do I believe in God?  No, I do not.  I believe that our world and the entire human race is, to the overall Universe, much less than a minuscule diatom swimming in the midst of an near, if not infinite sea.  We are simply beneath notice as far as the Universe is concerned.  That’s pretty damned insignificant.

As a result, we as a race are in deadly peril both from within our own ranks and racial instincts and DNA makeup as well as from external forces of such power and intensity that our race, planet and solar system could be wiped out literally in a flash of cosmic instability.

These “instabilities”, ranging from a simple “local” (our own Sun) Solar Flare aimed in just the wrong direction (i.e.the Earth) or perhaps less common;  a nearby supernova, collisions between neutron stars and black holes and black holes colliding which are detected every day throughout the universe in which we, a race of mites living on a dust spore circling a mere tiny candle within a flammable galaxy, inhabit.  The raw energy contained in one Xray jet from a supernova several hundred light years away, should it pass across the Earth, would scorch every living thing off the face of the planet as Earth rotated beneath it.

Our Sun and Earth just haven’t been close enough (in the cosmic picosecond of our own human existence) to any of these events to be affected – yet.  All life has been wiped from the face of the Earth numerous times in the earlier ages of the Universe (and much of it as recently as 65 million years ago)but as things calmed down some  billion or so years in the past, a self-replicating “something” came together out of the chemical cauldron on Earth at that time and – “life” happened  (or perhaps if you’d like to indulge in a flight of fancy and a passing comet dropped that “something” life form on us in a collision).  Which is not an impossibility.

We are, cosmically speaking, nonexistent.  The Universe cares not a whit for our planet, for our solar system or for us.  Our existence is a cosmic happenstance, the result of a chemical crap-shoot and one which may or may not be a rare occurrence throughout the Universe at large.

This concept tends to be daunting and the idea of a great uncaring Universe is frightening which results in many people relying on the comforts of superstition and religion because they find such a lonely and dangerous image unacceptable.

What it truly means is that the human race is on its own.  We are locked into this particular Universe, at least, by the Laws of Physics.  There is no one to watch over and take care of us, no life after death, no heaven, no hell.  We are just an ever expanding horde of bipedal animals (and most not very smart at that) spreading and copulating and multiplying and eating and defecating and polluting and destroying the only nest we all depend upon to nourish and sustain us.  This, on top of Cosmic indifference to our existence and we are in deep trouble indeed.

Not a happy picture, but one which I believe that truly states the case.

On top of all this, for the human race, there is an absolutely unimaginatively supreme responsibility for which we are responsible.  If we are indeed alone in this vast Universe we have the near infinite and absolute requirement ever assigned to, instead of destroying ourselves, to flourish, expand into near-Earth (orbit, Moon, etc.), the Solar System and eventually the Stars.  We must.  We have to accept the responsibility that the Universe is ours and then, over what ever time span it takes, explore it and make it our own.  We will actually continue to evolve as this happens to enable us to accomplish it.  We may evolve into a number of sub-species based upon our human model. That’s how Nature built us.

BUT – if we’re NOT alone and there are indeed other life forms out there somewhere – from a microbe in the dirt of Mars to a race of advanced beings out of a science fiction novel, we have an equally huge responsibility to insure we prosper and preserve so we have the capability to understand and deal with that other life if it should ever be found (or find us).

In either case it is our job, as human beings to “Live long and Prosper!” (as Dr. Spock said many times) because our jobs in this Universe have not yet really begun.  But we are on the cusp.

For those who insist on immortality and clinging to dogma let me add a point to give even you a moment of cheer.

As a philosophical and abstract point, there is indeed such a thing as reincarnation!  Not the reincarnation as generally conceived of or professed by  “crystal clangors”, fading New Age “seers” or Millennium new comers, but none the less there is reincarnation of a sort.

It begins this way.  The very elemental particles of which we are made did not exist in the Cosmos when it burst from its infinitely small, infinitely dense point of pre-existence.  The only elemental particles that were spread initially throughout the new Universe were hydrogen and helium – the first two very light elements in the periodic table and very simple elements indeed consisting of one atom each (H and He).

Those complex and heavier elements from which our Earth and all of us are made only came into existence through the fiery furnace of the heart of Suns – through nuclear reaction at the center of Suns which formed in clumps and bundles within a few hundreds of thousands of years after what we call the Universe came into being.  As these huge very hot early stars rapidly aged, eventually, in their dying throes, they blew up – supernova, they are called, scattering heavier elements created at their cores throughout space surrounding them.

Other suns formed using these gasses and heavier elements and over many generations of such cycles, as more and more heavier elements were spawned and scattered and regathered, planets coalesced  around new suns from these dense dust and gas clouds provided by earlier generations of stars which had died so violently.  Our own Sun will someday, perhaps five billion years or so down the river of time,  expand to a glowing red ball of gas the size of the orbit of the Earth.  It will then collapse with a bang, blowing the remains of all of us and the crust of Earth itself into space.  Into space where it will eventually be gathered up and reformed into new suns and planets and perhaps even life.

For we are all made of star dust and to star dust we will all return.

We are, in a very real way, immortal. And in spite of all religions to the contrary, that’s all we get.

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes. View all posts by MuckAbout