Humanity Dies

Humanity dies.

Always it is dying. The humans need to eat to survive. They need the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen and a handful of other gasses to keep from suffocating. They need a full atmosphere of pressure just to keep their bodies from hemorrhaging apart. Microorganisms invade their bodies and kill them. Sometimes their cells even attack themselves and the body dies.

But even without all these, if a perfect human lives in atmosphere with all the food and gases it needs, shelter, safe from micro and macro-organisms alike, even then, after a long enough time it just dies. All the processes that keep it alive just stop, for no good reason.

Hardly an intelligent design.

Somewhere on a space vessel, a tiny rock punctures the hull, and humanity dies. Not enough shielding from the radiation of space, and humanity dies. Somewhere, humanity fights itself, and it dies by its own hands. A group of cells begin replicating too quickly, and humanity dies. Sometime a filter fails, the balance of gasses shifts, and humanity dies.

Humanity is always dying, any time, place, or way you care to interact with it. So many design flaws compounding, so many bad physiological choices, so many psychological errors. To humanity this is normal.

Humanity considers itself created to die. Doesn’t consider that there is any other way. When it met us, humanity thought we were the strange ones. Then it died.

Here is a human expression: the short end of the stick. It means to be unfortunate. To not have as many good things as other parties. Humanity got the short end of the stick.

Every time you talk with humanity, it is a manic preoccupation that runs under the words. Humanity always talks about what it is going to do before it dies. It is unsettling. Humanity doesn’t even seem to want life. Humanity calls it “immortality.” Mortality means death. Our life, humanity calls “not-death,” and that’s probably the most telling thing about humankind there is.

But for all its flaws and stupid design errors, humanity is successful. I asked a human why, once, and it told me after some thought: “Gotta make your mark before you kick off, right?”

“Making your mark” means creating something that will be remembered. “Kicking off” is another one of a thousand words humanity has for death. I thought at the time that those were both of them such novel ideas. But to humanity, they are normal.

Humanity is absolutely obsessed with making its mark. Then after it has done so, it dies. No time to enjoy its labors, no periods of rest; humanity works and works and struggles without stopping, and then it dies. Such a bizarre species. Many of us think humanity is kind of pointless. And yet...

Where we colonize a dozen worlds, humanity conquers hundreds. And then it dies. Where we know how to split atoms, humanity has figured out how to put them back together any way it wants. Then it dies. We occasionally build art and monuments, but humanity puts them on every world it can live on, and even those it can’t. Afterwards, it dies. We draw life from the stars, but humanity has learned to make them dance to its will. And then it is dead.

Anything our philosophers grapple with, humanity already has an answer. Anything we build or create or alter, humanity has already done so. Our theories are examined by humanity and either proven right or discarded as wrong. Humanity already knows the answers. We struggle to learn even the basics of human communication, but humanity picks up our language and cultural lexicons almost as an afterthought. And at the end of all this, it still dies.

Humanity dies and dies and dies and we, in our ‘non-death’—we can’t get out of its shadow. Humanity does great things and dies, but more humanity is always there, and it is always better. A manic obsession with constant improvement. Of working until it dies. Of making its mark.

Humanity has no time to enjoy its accomplishments. It never sits back and looks at all it has done because it is always busy doing more before it dies. It creates wonders and forgets that they’re wonders because the new humanity that comes has always had them; those wonders become normal. This concern over death drives it in a constant struggle—here is another human phrase: rat race—and informs everything humanity does. It can never escape death, even though it runs from it. Then the new humanity starts where the old left off and runs further before it too dies. Ironically, this is what humanity calls ‘the cycle of life.’

We do not have to worry about such things. We will not die. We will never end. We may spend as long as we want enjoying our lives and the things we create. None of the frantic obsession that plagues humanity. This is very fortunate for us.

So why do I feel that it is we who got the short end of the stick?