Essays, Analyses and Meditations


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The Meaning of Life

  • Over the last 50 years alone, the human race has managed to create two major threats to life on Earth: first the "nuclear holocaust" and then "climate change".
  • The most technologically advanced part of Europe was destroyed by the two world wars. In a sense, the purpose of centuries of European and Japanese technological progress was to destroy Europe and Japan (and with it a big chunk of the world).
  • What will be the next human-engineered threat to life on this planet? What will people fear two or three decades from now?
  • It is getting easier and easier for human society to destroy the planet. The odds that we succeed seem to increase with technological progress, which is likely to increase in the future.
  • Whatever we end up doing, even if we destroy the whole planet, it was in our genes.
  • Could it be that this is precisely the mission of the human race? Could it be that the human race is just like the fire that destroys the forest, a natural catastrophe that in the long run helps the forest regenerate itself?
  • Does life always self-destroy, everywhere in the universe?