The Cosmos from the perspective of a biochemical reaction with self-delusions

 In the zoo, a man is standing in front of an enclosure which holds a group of primates. Of the latter, most are doing the things that primates like to do when left to their own devices: eating, sleeping, arguing and so on. Yet one primate in this group is different. From where he is standing in the primate enclosure, he is looking outside, beyond the walls of the enclosure. Beyond the bars. To the skies and the freedom, but also this primate that is standing there. Outside the enclosure, looking at him.

As the gaze of both these primates meet, many thoughts flash through their minds. Who is this other primate? What are they thinking of? What would it be like outside these walls that confine? What would living inside the enclosure be like? Might these other primates at the other side of the confinement also hold similar thoughts?

As night falls and the group of primates is herded back into their night enclosure, this one primate in the group steals one last look behind him. At the night sky with so many points of lights, and the place beyond the enclosure where that odd primate was standing earlier that day. The thoughts they shared with that one gaze. Maybe one day...


If there's one thing which is remarkable beyond description, it truly has to be the ability of the human species to both amaze and disappoint. When on one hand you have thousands of years of science and the most brilliant minds that humanity has produced so far, and on the other the ceaseless attempts by humanity to not only sabotage itself and destroy as much of itself as it humanly can, but also to ruthlessly ignore or even destroy the scientific works produced by others.

After reading Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', one cannot help but feel a sense of intense loneliness and pointlessness, along with desperate hope and appreciation for the amazing feats that humanity is capable of during its better moments. Even so, humanity as a species has barely registered in a geological sense, never mind on a cosmic scale. Are we alone in the Cosmos? What is the point of all of this?

Unless we are actually just that group of primates in an enclosure called 'Earth', while being observed by other intelligent species, it is highly likely that we are in fact alone. Or at least in this tiny, minuscule, mostly deserted part of the Milky Way, which itself is a rather dull galaxy in a Cosmos that is so vast that the primate inside the enclosure has more of a chance to grasp the vastness of Earth's surface, rather than us human primates of grasping even the vastness of our neighbourhood of the Milky Way, never mind the Cosmos.


Most of the Cosmos we have never even seen or observed in any fashion, as all electromagnetic radiation and other forms of signals that we could observe are still on their way to this part of the Milky Way. Even after billions of years, the speed of light is not fast enough to cross these vast distances. On such vast time scales, it leaves one to wonder whether maybe humanity reached this stage in their evolution too early, or too late compared to any potential other intelligent life.

Perhaps these other civilisations don't live near enough, but a few galaxies over. Perhaps there simply is no way to communicate with another civilisation that far away which doesn't take thousands or millions of years at light speed in each direction. Or perhaps we really are the only form of life that is capable of any level of inter-planetary communication and beyond that happens to be around at this point in time.

Perhaps another civilisation will show up on a world within easy communication and perhaps even travel distance, within a mere few thousand years after humanity has managed to destroy the Earth's biosphere sufficiently that survival is no longer an option for even the most wealthy or influential members of the human species. Perhaps they caught the radio transmissions we sent out many years before that, and decided to pop over in their faster-than-light (FTL) capable spacecraft.


Carl Sagan worried when he wrote 'Cosmos' in the late 1970s that humanity would wipe itself out in a great nuclear weapons fuelled fire amidst the feud between the Empires of the USSR and USA. That fear has fortunately not come to fruition, in no small part due to the strategy of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This had both sides essentially in a stalemate position with each only a hair trigger away from obliterating the other Empire and plunging the Earth's biosphere into a violent and highly uncertain nuclear winter. Since neither side felt like a suicide attack at any point in time, and a few technical glitches fortunately didn't culminate in the accidental launch of nuclear-tipped ICBMs, Sagan was able to write further books well into the 1990s, until his death in December of 1996.

Since that time, humanity has launched the International Space Station (ISS), and robots are scouring the surface of Mars and soon other planetary and other bodies within the solar system. The Voyager space craft, which Sagan was involved with, have made it far out of the solar system and beyond the reach of our Sun. Humanity has never before been this close to making new discoveries and cover ground in new explorations that may - and likely will - change our fundamental understanding of this solar system and everything beyond it forever.


Humans are a primate species which has made it pretty far through a series of lucky coincidences. We are now at a level where we should theoretically be living in peace and safety, as no predators can harm us, and we have the means to not have to fear lacking shelter, food or clean water to drink. And yet here we are.

Maybe it is that humanity is held back by its evolutionary roots. Courtesy of many millions of years of evolution, adding and tweaking, primate brains are built up out of distinct regions, identifiable as belonging to distinct eras in the evolutionary tree. We are after all self-replicating, highly complex biochemical processes that didn't form this way overnight, but had to fight to survive, to replicate and evolve. This may put certain constraints on what the average human being would prioritise and focus on. Because it was the right thing to do for millions of years.


It's depressing to consider how close humanity came well over two-thousand years ago to having a scientific revolution courtesy of the Ionian culture that spawned most of the great thinkers we often refer to as just 'Ancient Greek'. Yet ultimately humanity instead ended up dragging itself through thousands of years of darkness before the Renaissance began to revive those old ideas about science rather than superstition and kin. Tragically even today we can observe today the ongoing destruction and vilification of the scientific method and those who seek to adhere to it. All of this paint humanity as a whole into a rather grim light.


Even without the Sword of Damocles in the form of thermonuclear destruction dangling above our heads every moment, most of humankind is like the rest of the group of primates in their zoo enclosure. Uninterested in learning more about the world and everything else around them, content to live out their brief lives, or too occupied with procuring the means to maintain their existence before it naturally expires to ever really notice that there's a whole world beyond the bounds of Earth.

Those of us who gaze at the stars and wonder what else is out there find ourselves torn between hope as well as the fear both of, and for the human species. The good we can do, and the terrible things that many of us end up choosing. Will we ever make it out there, among the stars? Or will human civilisation flicker and die, leaving barely a scratch on Earth's geological record, left there for perhaps another, an alien civilisation to stumble over and wonder what things must have been like back then?

That history is still left for us and future generations to write.


Maya