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Monday, July 17, 2006 - 03:14 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Life, the (Optimistic) Estimations

80 years - 29200 days - 700800 hours - 42 million minutes - 2.5 billion seconds

One-third in slumber, to feed and various physiological needs - 1.7 billion seconds remain

Walk - 5km/h - 2.3 million kilometres - circle Earth 57 times at the Equator - three round trips to the Moon if there were a spacebridge to it
Read - one page a minute - 28 million pages - 66000 fair-sized books - over 200000 titles produced in Europe each year
Think - one discrete thought a second - 1.7 billion thoughts - less than a third of the people currently living

Existence - what is the argument for mortality? Not the invulnerability and omnipotence accorded to divine beings, but that of Tolkien's ageless elves, who live on until they are fatally wounded. One would expect systems to become stronger as they grow, like the dragons of fantasy who gather their strength for millenia, sleeping mere aeons away.

But that is evidently not so. Cells age, and die, even when they are supplied all the nutrients they require. Is their passing written into their DNA somewhere, in the length of their telomeres? Is there a hidden switch in one of Nature's grandest codes, an acid with a base of four?

What is the motivation? Was premandated death a mutant strain, that somehow survived where the pure ones could not? Did such longlivedness invite hubris, the doom of the gods? One could imagine that such organisms might spend little time cultivating offspring, or indeed view them as a threat - for what use are heirs, when the self is always better?

Man's life expectancy has ballooned tremendously, as has his numbers, technology, and all manner of small things in the last centuries, as far as we know. Our eldest are still far from Methuselah, but that particular mystery may yet be unravelled; All impossible and foolish thoughts, from the flatness of Earth to the hanging vapour of the furthest stars, started so, as the ramblings of heretics and madmen.

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
� Alexander Pope

There will be no punishment for presumptuous Babels any longer, but unrestricted lifespans, more than almost any advancement I can imagine, could be Man's final reckoning. It would be the last test of human nature, our selfishness and indulgement. Without the great equaliser of Death, the playing field would forever be tilted, and whether the antediluvians would hold the younger in their thrall, degenerate into an eternity of mindless cavorting or sink into insanity is an open question.

But, despite all that, we will try it. Or, some of us will - but even one, is more than enough. Mankind is a child just opening his eyes, flailing his tiny fists in his cosmic crib. As Michael Crichton has Ian Malcolm say in Jurassic Park: "...In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines... It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing..."

Perhaps, one day, we will be as the aliens in Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series, who span the universe as beings of energy. Clarke described them beautifully - beings who, because in all the Galaxy, found nothing more precious that Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

A world where taxes are all that is left. Doesn't sound promising.



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