The Island

the opposite. History is littered with the tragedies of wars waged on behalf of the strong against the weak. These wars destabilise and reinforce a non-holistic mentality. Why is human nature following this route in its evolution? Is this behaviour embedded in all animals? Most animals display territorial behaviour. The male of the species will often have to fight off other males to protect his territory. The male has this inbuilt mechanism that allows wars to happen. All life is a struggle for survival and this just must be reflected back in our human behaviour. The cosmos does not nurture life. It exists to the best of our knowledge very rarely in the vast expanse of the universe. It may only exist on our tiny blue planet. It exists against the odds. The probability of life sparking into existence at all are incredibly low. So many things had to be in place. The laws of science, as we know them, had to be very exact to allow us to come into existence. Is life just a by-product of the existence of the cosmos or is it central to it? That the cosmos is trying to snuff out life indiscriminately, suggests that life is just that - a mere by-product. It must struggle to survive the chance trials that the cosmos throws its way. The dinosaurs signally failed. The cosmos threw up an impact of rock from outer space and swatted them out like flies. This was pure chance - not ordained or planned. It was an unconcerned cosmos that fated their demise. The movement of that piece of matter was dictated by the laws of motion, to always have a trajectory to strike the earth. There may be millions of others equally fated to hit us in some future moment. All our earthly struggles will be for nought. Every last trace, even of lowly bacterial life, could be wiped clean from the planet.

  If the cosmos has no designs on the future or origins of life, how has life come into being? The laws of science do not encode a need for life or suggest that life is a necessary consequence of being. The cosmos can and did exist for billions of years, without life being present. It is our greatest proof of there being an objective world out there. Descartes wasn't aware of the aeons of time that passed before life came into being. If he had, his 'cogito ergo sum' comment would not have been necessary. I am, because the objective cosmos out there is, and has been, at least back to the proposed Big Bang.

  But the cosmos has provided a mechanism whereby the various elements are brewed in the cosmological soup of evolving and dying suns. The elements are the real seeds of life. It is they, that can be seen to be imbedded in the physical laws of our universe. They are the direct result of the application of these laws. That elements form molecules and more complicated chemical structures, is also an outcome of these laws. In that respect one can say that life was encoded, albeit very vaguely, in the basic laws of the universe. That it evolved is purely fortuitous and its survival is equally a fortuitous affair as far as the universe is concerned. There is no guarantee within the laws that life can or must survive.

  To survive life must counter the chance events that the cosmos can throw at it. If life remains in an undeveloped state then there is a great certainty that eventually it will be snuffed out by an eventual chance catastrophe. To survive, life had to develop intelligence. This intelligence evolved to the present ?poque, where humanity has achieved an understanding of the laws of the universe. This limited understanding allows the threat of extinction to at least be recognised. Today we are aware of the potential threat of comets or asteroids. Humanity will survive if the monitoring of comet and asteroid motion can warn of impending collision. Humanity will survive if technology can alter the course of a colliding object, far out in space. To get to this level of ability, humanity has to invest in the vast enterprise of developing knowledge and its attendant technological innovations. This is a race against time because it is quite certain that there have been impacts in the past and that there will be others in the future. When that future is, no-one knows. The sooner humanity acts the greater the chances of survival not just of mankind but of all life.

  The current world does not have this mind-set. It is concerned with relatively minor national power squabbles. These wars are internecine from the perspective of the overall real threat to civilisation. The drivers of these conflicts are the very deniers of the potentially dire fate of humanity. The political, religious and economic drivers of local wars, force a very localistic paradigm on mankind. It encourages disunity of mankind rather than unity. It displaces resources that should be focused on threats that potentially could affect all of humanity.

  I was turning towards despair of the future. I did not want to descend to that place again. The dawn had been wonderful and had filled me with elation and hope for the world. The beauty had inspired me to think long and hard about its reality. I had closed my eyes on the beauty and let my thoughts run wild. Now I opened my eyes again and let the beauty back in. The thoughts of the here and now flooded back. My being seemed to re-emerge. I had sensations of heat on my skin from the sun and pains in my stomach from hunger. I heard the cries of the gulls and the lapping of the waves at the base of the cliff. The visual stream of colours took form and recreated the sea, sky and land. I felt my presence in the outline of my body as it squatted in a sitting posture on the grass. I became a man again. The desires and traumas of the last few days came back. Words and sentences concerning my own existence formed in my brain. What was I doing here? Where was Sorcha? Did I still love her? What did I now feel for Molly? Did I despise or pity her? And Maria? She was just a casual affair- of no consequence - just a pleasant memory.

  I was out from my dreamworld and back in reality. Decisions had to be made. I knew that my staying on the island was now too complicated. The situation could only get worse. In an instant I had decided to pack up. The grand project that I had set myself, was, in a way, finished. Pure speculation was good but in isolation it could only become circuitous and repetitious. I needed the stimulation of more knowledge. That in itself was a revelation of sorts. I'd had the impression that the store of knowledge I'd accumulated was enough to tackle the questions that were appearing before me. But I now knew that it is a parallel process - learning and questioning go hand in hand.

  The realisation that I was about to leave filled me with sadness. I had grown accustomed to my high lofted den. The sense of space that the vast expanse of ocean presented had the effect of dragging me out from my self, into the being of the greater world. In that context my concerns took on their proper dimension and seemed to disappear into an infinitesimal cloud, a mere drop of condensation of events in the vast fluffiness of the clouds of the cosmos. Yet this tiny cloud was my own, my local environment where my presence had significance and, potentially, the power to influence the grand course of all spacetime, from the point of the big bang towards a distant infinity. Just as chaos theory suggests that the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can cause storms on the other, so my small efforts at understanding my being, may in the vastness of spacetime have similar impact. What I achieve in this briefest of existence is entangled with every particle of the universe, however minutely that entanglement becomes, as we move away from my direct local spacetime. It is that realisation that all things leave their trace, their faint ghost in the fabric of spacetime that gives me hope that existence is not a meaningless trick of a demonic reality.