“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.”  - (Genesis 1:28)
The idea of creation is not unfamiliar for me at all, since I was raised in a Catholic family and I attended a Catholic school for 6 years, before I started wandering to the whole wide world. Since I was a kid I have never totally agreed with this classic theological view that human is the most perfect creation, and I've once pissed my priest off by asking, "why are there no dinosaurs in Noah's arc?"

Another reason why I decided to write about this is totally related to our current situation on the earth. If you are reading this in 2030 or so, we have an outbreak of a SARS-Type Virus that resulted a disease called COVID-19. We are still working on this right now, and if you are reading this then we managed to get through this. Fingers crossed.

For the sake of a better reading experience, I divide this post into two parts. It will be about two sides of the same coin. If you don't feel right about reading this first part, you can totally go and return after these two posts finished. There is no point only reading the second one. Thanks.

The existence of life on earth is a glitch in the matrix of the universe.


 Why do I think so? Let's start with the famous Fermi paradox : "If there are life out there, where are they? Why haven't we seen them yet?" I'm not gonna discuss about this paradox too much in this post, I save it for another day. As 02.03.2020, we haven't find any proof of life outside the earth so far. We are alone, stuck on this rock with other millions species of plants, animals, bacterias, and so on.

If life on earth is indeed a feature of the universe and humans are created to be on the top of the food chain, we should be able to live without problems. Instead, what happened? Nature always tries to kill us. Name it : nature disasters, breakouts, threats from outer space, the list goes on forever. So far we are doing an okay job in keeping our species from extinction. But no means it was an easy task. We always struggled. Don't think so? We are now under a threat from a 200-nm virus and people are rushing to supermarkets to get canned foods and toilet papers. Still think we are superior?

As for now, we already got a lot better in terms of surviving. We could predict storms quite well (even not perfectly), we could know if some disasters are going to happen, such as tsunamis and volcano eruptions, and some unpredictable disasters such as earthquakes are not a big deal for us anymore. By no means it is already not dangerous, but if you compare our situation to the past hundred years, we are doing much better than before.

So, what is the biggest threat for our existence right now? 


Firstly, other life on earth. No, not lions or sharks. Viruses and bacterias, that cause diseases. They are still a big threat. 36 millions of us dead because of HIV/AIDS, Influenza still kills millions, Cholera, and so far more than 3000 have died from the COVID-19. Are we doing much better than before in this area, too? Yes. Absolutely. Black plague in 14th century kills approx. 75-200 millions, plague of Justinian kills around 20 millions, and so on. In some weeks we already have a quite good understanding of the RNA chain of the virus, thanks to our technology and science development. Our understanding of science and technology grow exponentially. If this rate continues, in next 50 or hundred years we might be able to heal every disease in seconds and double our life expectancy.

The question is : If other life is no longer a threat to us, what will be?

 Ourselves. Our behaviour and every thing we do to each other could kill us. Nuclear war, biological weapons, you know it. The better understanding of science could also come at a cost. A vast developed society is more likely to kill each other than to be killed by its surroundings. Even some experts take this hypothesis as an answer to the Fermi paradox. There were other life out there, but they are so developed that they become extinct due to themselves long time ago. Could this be a future of humanity?

Sooner or later we will become extinct, either by other life on earth, other life outside earth, or most likely by ourselves. Not to mention the setbacks of our desire to learn and think (which I will cover in other episode), there will be nothing else to blame for our extinction. It may sounds ironic, but I will not be surprised if this happen.

In other case, if we are not killing each other, we still could kill ourselves unintentionally. Our ignorance is one of the biggest trait of humanity that could evolve to be a threat. Our arrogance, being self-centered without thinking of others will last longer than our existence. I don't know about you, but there is no point being the last human to live. It doesn't show that you are the strongest human ever; it shows how ignorant you are and that is what kills us all.

As we are getting better at understanding the nature and our universe, our behaviour are not. Ignorance, racisms, phobias are still the same problems since the beginning of our existence. We managed to learn how our brain works, but we are still not able to manage our brain to learn from our mistakes.

(To be continued.)

In the next episode I will discuss about 'Lebenskraft', what makes us 'a life', other than just a bunch of atoms together. Till then, have a nice one.