When I meditate – which I do sporadically, though I keep intending to get more regular about it because it always makes me feel better – I see myself as being one with the universe.
I don’t mean I’m the all-encompassing universe all by myself. I mean I’m a tiny speck of this amazing great whole.
I find this very comforting. It reminds me that so much of what is touted as of paramount importance is really meaningless.
It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do good in the world as best I can, but it does help me let go of too much attachment to the outcome of anything I do. These days, with so much damage being done to our lives every day, I find it helpful to remember that while doing is up to me, outcomes aren’t.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman has a chapter called “Cosmic Insignificance Theory,” which I think is much the same thing as my meditation. He observes:
Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks [four thousand weeks is an average human lifespan] isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough, marvelously – really is.
Cosmic insignificance theory is diametrically opposed to the kind of world the broligarchs seem to be after, particularly the ones who think they’re going to live forever, perhaps uploaded and combined with some all-powerful “AI.”
It seems to be a religious quest, though I must say most religions don’t include people becoming gods, which is the undertone I get from all of this. For those of us who embrace our cosmic insignificance and don’t believe in gods, much less in becoming gods, living as good a life as we can for our short period of time feels worthwhile.
But if you’re trying to convince yourself you’re not cosmically insignificant, I suppose you would act as if you’re entitled to run the whole damn universe. Part of the broligarch vision seems to be spreading humanity throughout the universe – sort of the ultimate colonization.
I’m not quite sure if that is supposed to be actual physical people (and if so are they immortal or just a lot of minions for the broligarch gods?) or uploaded digital versions, but they talk in terms of trillions of people.
And apparently they’re through with Earth – they’re certainly not doing anything to stop climate change – or at least they want to use it up to build this future swarm of humanity.
The other day, The New York Times ran an op-ed in which someone called Elon Musk a “visionary” apparently because he is aware that the Sun will eventually get so hot that it will be impossible to live on Earth. That’s why he wants to go to Mars.
I’m pretty sure that the eventual death of the Sun will affect Mars, too, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he means it as a first step.
The thing is, what’s the big hurry?
Our Sun will probably die out in about 5 billion years. Earth might become uninhabitable due to changes in the sun in about a billion years.
I mean, we’ve got time, assuming the human race or whatever we might evolve into is still around by then.
Just as a point of contrast, in Burkeman’s book he points out that human civilization is about six thousand years old, by which I believe he means the points where we had some large organized societies in China and Egypt and so forth. Ancestors that can be seen as human go back on the planet about 150 thousand years, give or take.
We haven’t been around all that long, not even close to a million years, much less a billion, and though some of our ancestors were pretty good at living in reasonable balance with the Earth, as a whole we’re still struggling with how to live well on a planet that is absolutely perfect for human life (or we wouldn’t exist).
I often feel like we’re just getting to the point where we can begin to understand things.
So what’s the rush about moving out into the rest of the galaxy and then the Universe? We have time. We have lots of time.
We can spend the next million years figuring out how to explore the place. Maybe we’ll figure out how to deal with radiation and how to reproduce in places that are not as conducive to our health as the Earth.
Maybe faster than light travel – or something better – will eventually exist in real time and not just in the pages of science fiction. (I mean, I used it in The Weave. I like the idea, but it does seem like we’re going to have to understand a great deal more before it becomes more than a useful plot device.)
If we don’t blow ourselves up and instead figure out how to live well on this planet and safely explore beyond it, in a million years we might really know something.
And it will still be another 999 million years before the Sun gets too hot for us here.
Pretty sure the Universe can wait until we know what we’re doing.