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Episodes
5 days ago
5 days ago
Life is rare, beautiful, and precious. Human conscious life is even more rare, beautiful, and precious.
Many humans in our society have adopted a fundamentally misanthropic or antihumanist perspective. They believe people are fundamentally destructive, violent, cruel, and that humans destroy all other life. They believe that humans are tiny, randomly generated creatures without agency or meaning. They believe that the planet would be better off without humans on it, or at lest far fewer of them. They believe that humans are likely to destroy themselves and much of the planet with them.
I disagree. Those viewpoints are wrongheaded, nihilistic, and antihuman. I want to try to help you appreciate how valuable and rare conscious human life is. To do this we will focus on considering the composition of our solar system. We consider the scale of the solar system, the size of the sun and planets, and then consider life on Earth. We show that for every 1,000,000 (one million) kgs in the solar system, about 2kgs is on Earth. For every one billion kg of mass on Earth, about 1kg is alive. For every 10,000kgs of living organisms on Earth, about 1kg is human. For every 10 trillion kgs of mass on Earth, about 1kg is human.
Life is truly rare, precious and beautiful.
We examine and rebuttal three anti-human philosophies:
1. You are tiny and you barely matter.
2. Your life is random and meaningless.
3. You are responsible for destroying all life on Earth.
The choice is truly yours. Out of all of the vastness of space and time, out of all of the mass in our solar system alone, you are one in ten trillion. You can conclude that you are a tiny, insignificant speck, randomly generated by chance. That is a depressing, meaningless perspective. Or you can use your conscious mind, your fleeting moment of awareness, to look around, to examine the Earth, and its solar system, and the diversity of life and space and the cosmos, and you can conclude that life is rare, precious, and beautiful. You can comprehend that consciousness and human life is even rarer, more precious, and more beautiful. And you can do your best to live in a manner that appreciates that truth, by valuing your life, the lives of everyone around you, and the lives of every living thing around you.
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