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The Fragility of Knowledge: Humanity’s Quest for Continuity… July 18, 2024.

You make your mark and then expire. You came, you lived, you died. There is no steady, no flow, no continuance. Unless you make an indelible mark, once you expire, the book is closed, and may never be opened again.

Less than a flash, more like a sparkle, your length of existence is deplorably short. It seems such a waste to invest effort in establishing improvement, when, after remarkedly little time, you will be gone and forgotten.
The mighty sun that controls the orbits of many planets lasts billions of years. The Earth itself has been approximated at 4.5 billion. Life may have begun shortly after the solidifying of the planet. Macro life, much younger, is still estimated over 500 million years.
There is no strong continuance. One generation leaves some information for the next, but then they die, taking the nuances with them. It’s like each generation scrapes the scum from the top of the vat, all the details below being consigned to oblivion. Information accumulates, yet one life is inadequate to assimilate it all, no one man is capable of knowing all that has been learned, much less have time to add to it.
How does humanity improve from generation to generation? A record of what has been learned has been scribed. A fragile pool of information, vulnerable to the next catastrophe. If another asteroid comes at this early date all could be lost. It must be admitted that if no one survives, no one can learn from the information… If there is any recovery, whatever intelligence that follows, will have to start anew.
You have to wonder if life is just an exercise in futility.

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One response to “The Fragility of Knowledge: Humanity’s Quest for Continuity… July 18, 2024.”

  1. osirisgothra (osirisgothra) Avatar
    osirisgothra (osirisgothra)

    Which is why it is sad that so many people resign themselves to being controlled by society in total and never doing what they really want to do in their lives because they think it has some sort of meaning in the grand scheme when it actually doesn’t.

    Even if history remembers us, it won’t remember us forever. The person who invented the first tool for example, one of the single most important steps for man, and not a single person on the planet knows who did it or how it happened. We only have scientific theory and “maybe” to go on.

    But the one thing that is sure is that the stuff done 2 million years, as important as it was to them, isn’t recorded anywhere now. Likewise, it stands to reason 2 million years more, none of these artists, actors, or “important” figures of the world will have any place, if humans even exist by that point. More likely that great destruction will come and start us over either by our hand or by the hand of nature.

    So why be a slave to someone else? Live for yourself, think for yourself, be yourself. Instead of being a fake controlled-by-society individual because you think you are helping people who are “important” but in the long run all that won’t be remembered anyway.

    As for predicting life after death, predicting life after a million or so years is impossible, but we DO know for sure is that eventually nobody will remember you. Let’s change “go down in history” to “be remembered *slightly* longer”

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