Writing Our First Chapter
The whole human being’s on planet earth thing is kinda odd isn’t it?
I’m cautious to share this one over email, but I wanted to have it somewhere in writing because it’s important to me personally. It’s a lot of my life philosophy after thinking first-principals about the world. This life thing is kinda odd, but hardly a coincidence. I started thinking about it *a lot* as a teenager and haven’t found many good answers in philosophy and religion, so I turned to statistics and science.
The first data point I got was a teenager, and it was this essay (one of my favorite by Carl Sagan) called the pale blue dot, I come back to it a few times a year:
Basically it’s a picture that voyager 2 took out past Saturn (maybe the furthest ever taken where earth is visible). They turned the spaceship around to take it even though it produced little meaningful science. He wrote an essay about it too I linked in the caption, but basically the point was: look at this perspective and just think about how small we are and how everything that has ever happened has happened here. He has some beautiful language around it:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Recently though my perspective changed where I realized, wait, everything that has ever happened has happened there? That in of itself is kind of weird. We like to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, but it’s the center of our universe. In my reflection I started thinking not only about this photo (space) but also a perspective on time which is much harder to see but has an impact on the same magnitude.
I realized one very important thing, not only are we small in the scheme of things, but we are also very likely extremely close to the beginning of history. The pale blue dot of history doesn’t exist, but if it did it would look the same. A tiny spec in the timeline of the universe, so small that it’s basically a rounding error. This really helped me contextualize things in the bigger picture.
I don’t believe in the colloquial God the creator but I do believe in a few things related. If you put together the Fermi Paradox and likelihood that it’s possible we can create super smart machines - you end up believing one of two things:
Some God-like thing exists (ie super intelligence in the lightcone) and it hasn’t killed us yet, and is very likely benevolent - it’s just statistics that it would, otherwise there’s some other contradiction
Our situation is miracle-level rare, so explain that….
Either one kinda points to God, at least the loving caring kind that wants the best for humanity, so I guess I believe in that now lol.
Ok, but then you ask, why in the world is the world so terrible if God exists? Age old question. This is the part I’ve been thinking about recently, pretty deeply actually. I think it must have something to do with us being so close to the beginning of our history. Bad things have to happen for good things to happen (it’s just change and growth).
First, the world is getting much better much faster than it ever has, so that’s interesting. If we were close the beginning of time, it would kind of make sense to make the world a lot less bad before there are 1,000,000x more humans (which there likely will be). So really, we’re all just living through a rocky start so it can all be much much better later. Seems like a pretty good plan if you care about humanity.
It also tells us something about our part of the story. I think a lot of people question what’s important in the world, and the answer is actually super simple: we don’t know yet because we don’t know a lot. Asking what the purpose of humanity is 0.001% of the way (or less through our history) is like wanting to know the end of the story after you’ve read the first sentence. It’ ain’t gonna happen. The problem is that given our short lives, we’ll be blessed to only see the end of the second sentence (or paragraph)… which puts each individual human in a weird spot historically. We’re either at the very beginning or tragically close to the end, so I’m choosing to believe beginning because I’m an optimist and a humanist. Sometimes some of the most important things happen at the beginning of books, so here’s to an iconic first chapter.
That points me to the second part of this post called “what to do” that talks about taking action on these ideas which I’ll post tomorrow.