Woohoo: Life beyond earth
Outer space and extraterrestrial life have always fascinated me.
I contemplate civilization through the course of human history — our barbarisms, thoughts and choices, values and ideals, our survival mechanisms — and I’m always struck with probably the most simplistic but profound realization: we exist. We’re here, and this is all happening.
So, if life can tangibly inhabit this planet with billions of years of actions, motivations, achievements, and failures, why can’t life exist elsewhere in our universe? I guess there is a possibility that we could be alone — a solitary spinning ball of matter in a seemingly endless space of nothing, with a dizzying seven billion microscopic organisms, manipulating their personal spaces and affecting others with their life’s decisions — but I don’t buy it.
If it happened here, it can happen anywhere else.
The question is where? What kind of civilizations are out there? Are they more or less advanced than us? What do their planets look like? What could we learn from them? What could they learn from us? I’m frustrated that we don’t have answers, and that we might never have them. But we can dare to dream, and bask in the excitement of these amazing possibilities.
Boohoo: Life on earth
That being said, let’s face it. Mother nature, you fucked up.
You made us selfish, aggressive beings who formed a history moulded with shameless and brutish slaughter. You introduced disease, war and strife, and confined our biology to this ever-shrinking planet so that one day we would reproduce to a population so large that we’ll eventually kill ourselves off, if the products of our ‘intelligence’ don’t do it first.
Spawned from you are truly pointless things like Internet trends, celebrity gossip, belly buttons and appendixes, the re-boot of National Lampoon’s Vacation, fish porn, commercially sold pet rocks, and shoe umbrellas.
You introduced money, fame, love, politics — things that warmly cuddle us with their assurance, yet can rip us to shreds, Hulk-style. We’re left with the unfair challenge the of having to navigate ourselves through this turmoil of existence, and still survive with as much face as we can.
Sure, there are endless things to be thankful for and content with, but in the end I’m left wondering whether it could have all been different, or if this was always how it was going to be. Life on earth can suck, but we just gotta deal with it until some alien race swipes us off our feet!
