Death awaits us.

Death awaits us. This is no big deal, nothing lasts forever. We’re pretty short-sighted. Stephen Hawking, the most intelligent man alive today once said that he’d be surprised if mankind lasted another century. But  people often talk about what the human race will do when the Earth gets fried as our sun blows up into a red giant just before it blinks out in the darkness.

The perspective is fairly simple. You personally will die, we all will, and soon, probably way too soon for most of us. But that is nature. It is not you or me that matters, it’s not even our species, as the human race will assuredly also disappear, much more assuredly than the dinosaurs who at least stuck around for 650 million years. Extinction is the way it works. Currently we’re doing our damndest to bring the gift of extinction to as much of planetary life as we can. Meanwhile we’re bragging about how clever we are and how so very high up on the evolutionary ladder we are - we can just about reach God from up here!

We look out at the stars and say there must be life out there. There must be someone, something that we can hold a decent conversation with. All we have to do is blast a few songs in their direction and wait, they’ll come eventually and if they don’t we’ll just have to go and knock on their door. But the trouble is most people don’t understand physics and those who do don’t care to really listen to its message.

The physics are simple. We’re stuck out in the boonies, way too far for anyone to hear and we all, both us humans and those aliens, will not live long enough to swap music or chat over our radio telescopes. By the time they hear our Michael Jackson songs we’ll be dead and by the time Earth receives their alien funky jive their race would have bitten the dust.

No, neither race, not human nor alien would have become immortal or ethereal. We’d have succumbed to Darwin just like the rest of life. Because that’s exactly what we are – just like the rest of life. Our intelligence makes no difference in the long run. We can just talk more about our fleeting moment in the sun (so to speak). Sure, we can think we’re happier, we can think we’re destined for better things or that God loves us more than say a rat. But who knows, maybe rats are ecstatic in their little nests, partying away and not trying to convert anyone or blow up the world with nuclear bombs or greenhouse gases. Maybe, just maybe God is a rat and not an old white dude with a scraggly beard.

The best we can hope for is that we can prove Hawking wrong by a millennium or two and that we leave ourselves a small remnant of paradise amidst the desolation of our planet where we can try to be nice to each other and to our fellow living creatures. Just maybe we can eventually evolve into decent caring animals. Then perhaps the rats might say that we too have a chance of sticking around for a our own extinction like decent God-fearing animals.