Science can't save us from black hole of our irrelevance
A year ago, I attended the annual get-together of the USMC, the United States Marine Corps, in Europe. I'd love to be doing the same this week, but family obligations prevent it; and what guts me -- with the ease of a fishmonger's blade filleting a trout -- is the realisation that a full and entire year has elapsed since I spent an evening in the company of some of the finest men in the world.
The subject under review here is not the corps, but time itself. For that intervening period is now as insubstantial as gossamer -- and it is almost irrelevant how many years I have left. Pile gossamer upon gossamer, layer upon layer, and no matter how many silken skeins there are, they do not amount to much -- even before one considers what horrors those layers might consist of or contain.
Some people -- autistic individuals called "scientists" -- think that they understand time. I have no such knowledge. I am as ignorant of the meaning of time now as I was when a babe; time both as a cosmic phenomenon, and as an existential one. In the latter sense, it seems to be randomly apportioned to us, without our knowing what it is or why it is. After all, mankind has always gazed at the stars and felt the sickening vertigo of personal insignificance. And for all that science 'discovers' about the origins of the universe, the smaller personal questions still remain. The cosmic and the existential are one.
All my life, science has been on the verge of the 'breakthrough' which will explain the origins of the universe. Today presents us with yet another mighty threshold, as the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border begins the search for the elusive, and so far hypothetical, particle known as the "Higgs boson". This is supposed to be the key to existence, but never fear: once scientists have found this particular boson -- named after the great Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose -- they'll find some other even more elusive particle to go chasing after. Meanwhile, another band of well-funded lunatics is looking for the origins of the universe beyond the outer reaches of space.
It's all meaningless. The more doors we open, the greater the hall of darkness beyond; the more numerous the ensuing questions. Only a preposterous vanity can explain why men continuously think that we are close to discovering the 'truth' about existence, when we have no idea why or how, on this planet alone, there are probably some 30 million distinct species of insects, and perhaps 400 million different kinds of bacteria -- and that is before we gaze upwards, at the billions and billions of stars.
Every child who has heard about the Big Bang theory has asked what existed before the Big Bang, and how, and where and why. There is no non-magical answer to any of these wise, childish questions. Compared to the vast scale of the universe and all the things we know it contains, from black holes to the quasars, quarks and boses, we actually don't even have the ratiocinative talents of a halibut -- for that doughty fish never presumes to think that it is going to be able to understand the universe. And only a halibut with Alzheimer's entertains the delusion that the key to existence is discoverable by its little halibut brain -- and it is now in a halibut home, wearing nappies.
Intelligent Design or Darwinism, it makes no difference either way. Both, in their own fashion, are absurd intellectual pretensions -- for they presume to explain existence. Intelligent design believes in an almighty God who -- in all his goodness -- created numerous imperfect species, which then had to go through the abominable process of the weakest and the genetically flawed suffering terrible deaths, until finally today's extant species emerged. What a delightful deity. And omniscient Darwinism cannot explain how proteins came into existence.
Your body contains maybe a million different kinds of protein molecules, each composed of hundreds, possibly thousands, of amino-acid molecules, in incredibly complex arrangements. Even the simplest could never have been assembled by some weird accident in the original ammoniacal soup. Then, where did the magical DNA come from which enables the protein to reproduce, when DNA has no separate existence of its own, and no other function? Another accident? And why and how are the molecules of a living cell "different" from the identical molecules of a dead cell beside it?
Dead cells. That's our common destiny after we've each worn through our own particular allocation of the gossamer of time. And it's not so very far away. Years do not elapse, so much as whirl by -- the horse on the merry-go-round passes quicker and quicker, as the music gets shriller and shriller, and the laughter more and more maniacal. Time passes, and the mist of breath swiftly leaves the warm mirror, until the moment when there is no mist at all. In a thousand generations, deathbed man will be no wiser than he is today or was 10,000 years ago. Otherwise known as the Useless & Stupid Meditations of a Corpse. Frankly, I prefer the other USMC.
kmyers@independent.ie
