Why Should We Dread The Universe?
What goes around comes around. It’s unfathomable how there’s so much that’s beyond our control. According to a slew of hypotheses and theories, it took the right elements to position themselves in the right orientation at the right time under scorchingly hellish conditions that dominated the prehistoric Earth for the first living cell to originate. That’s abiogenesis. The concept of the formation of life from just inanimate material bewilders the most advanced species on this planet to date. Ever wondered how things would have been dramatically different if it weren’t for that massive asteroid that hurtled down towards the Earth approximately 65 Million years ago and wiped out the barbaric reptiles off the face of this planet?
Maybe things would have been better off if we hadn’t evolved. For centuries, we have been going on wars with each other, have been tampering with nature by engaging in the malignant practice of genome engineering, and are complicit in raising the global temperatures. We’re not conducive to sustained living on this planet. Chances of us trampling over each other and taking down other species with us seem substantially more than those of this giant ball being gobbled up by a 1000x hotter and more huge ball of flames. The perennial, apple of our eye lust for power threatens not just our own but our coexistent buddies’ remaining time on this planet as well. You’d think that during an utterly dire and acute situation that this pandemic brought upon us, we’d unite to battle it head-on. Absolutely not. As this virus continued to wreck economies and rob people of their lives, division, bigotry, hatred, misogyny, and racism crescendoed unabashedly and unabatedly.
Even a virus that clobbered all of us so hard and succeeded in changing the fabric of our society failed miserably to hammer home to us that we’re not invincible. It’s just excruciatingly painful for many of us to embrace kindness and treat other people with respect. The fundamental issues in this society got entrenched even deeper during this crisis. A law enforcement officer getting out on bail after asphyxiating someone who doesn’t look like him, science being politicized, democracy on the brink of being incinerated by a riled-up mob who got suckered into believing the big lie, the former president of the US acting as an arbiter of life and death by going on an execution spree during his lame-duck period, mass shooting events, same-sex marriage being constitutionally criminalized in Russia — all of these significant incidents serve as a testament to my previous statement.
Karma is an actual bitch. I’m emphasizing again. Our delusions about being impregnable will take just one rock hitting the ground to dispel as the millions of tons of released energy disintegrate us into oblivion. At that point, the immutable characteristics that have sown seeds of division ever since the evolution of mankind would be irrelevant. The rise of mammals after the dinosaurs went extinct exemplifies that life will go on, with or without us. Quoting William Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages”. Paraphrasing this a little bit, we are merely puppets with our strings being pulled by the universe. This sums up why we should dread it.
