Thoughts on
YOU ARE ALONE
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
Assuming Sir Clarke said the above quote (I couldn’t actually find the original source), I would have to disagree with my literary hero on that one, because in my opinion the former option is infinitely more terrifying.
People sometimes get offended when I suggest the possibility that we might be the only life in the universe. I admit I might not be able to truly comprehend the true vastness of the universe—the numbers are too big—but there is a number that is much easier for me to wrap my puny brain around: zero. For example, we have zero evidence of life beyond our own world; scientists have been able to simulate abiogenesis exactly zero times; and finally, based on available evidence, convergent evolution for self-awareness has occurred zero times in our planet’s history. Gun to my head, we are, indeed, alone.
The existential implications of this are colossal. If humans are the only shot the universe has at self-aware consciousness—if Earth is the only shot at complex or our current understanding of intelligent life—well, that’s a lot of responsibility for an intelligent species to bear. I shudder to imagine that there would one day be a universe without Earth and without self-reflective observers.
“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”
At the end of the vastly underrated MCU flick Avengers: Age of Ultron, a homicidal rogue AI and a benevolent AI are having a conversation about death and humanity. The result is the quote you see above which, at ninety seconds and brilliantly performed by Paul Bettany and James Spader, is worth watching.
Vision’s quote is an excellent philosophy to navigate this particular answer to the Fermi Paradox: that we are alone, combined with the likelihood that we are doomed. This is also how I would navigate the concept of my own death. Finality is, indeed, what gives life meaning, and I imagine this is only truer at the grandest of scales.
Still, I’m so thankful humanity could exist at all—”it’s a privilege to be among them”—so that we have a chance to appreciate this universe. If no intelligent species ever existed at all to appreciate this reality, even for a short time, well . . . as one of my heroes who didn’t wear a cape might have said in a different context, that would have been an awful waste of space.