Fac ut Vivas

—– I —–

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day, the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age"

———– From The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft

—– II —–

While writing those ominous lines above, I suddenly remembered scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s film Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) where the protagonist (a war-weary knight returning from the crusades) is consumed by emptiness and doubt. Life seems to be without meaning. God or the devil does not exist. They are perspectives (and/or projections) in a time badly in need of hope (or, in the case of the devil, a scapegoat). In a land ravaged by plague, belief in supreme beings did little to improve the lot of the desperate. As if those weren’t enough problems for our knight, Death has come for him and he is living on borrowed time.

—– III —–

Is there life after death?

Does the cold and vast emptiness of space reinforce the notion that earth is the only planet blessed/cursed by sentience?

—– IV —–

If our destiny is neither in heaven nor in hell, but to disappear completely from this time line, persisting only in the memories of those left behind (but eventually diminishing as time passes), as if we never were, is it right to feel sad? — or worse, happy?

—– V —–

It is a brief moment that we have in this universe when measured against the lifetime of stars. Even on the scale of a second, some 2 billion…. it is extremely brief.

The universe is estimated to be "13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty of 200 million years" (according to wikipedia).

Even with the means to communicate our existence (through various technologies), it’s like kicking up a lot noise and no one is bothered. Or flashes of lightning in total darkness.

—– VI —–

In the Alpha Centauri computer game, one of the faction leaders, emphasized that the greater conundrum asks why a Perfect God bothered to create the universe at all.

—– VII —–

A colleague once wrote (during his undergraduate years) that there must be a God because without him all those blasted Physics equations don’t mean squat.

—– VIII —–

….. The end of summer is just around the corner. I’m still stuck in this computer, tied to this chair, typing away at the keyboard to forget the fact that it has been a long semester and I’m due for a complete shutdown.