* * *
As I stare into a clear night sky and ponder mysteries such as the existence of life on other
planets, I recall that life almost came to an end on our own planet during the
Permian-Triassic extinction around 250 million years ago, long before the more
famous dinosaur extinction. Life mysteriously arose on Earth nearly 4 billion
years ago, then gaily swam about for the next 3.5 billion years before evolving the ability to come out of the water and onto the land. So it was just
about half-way between then and now that life’s experiment on Earth nearly came
to an end.
I have a hard enough time acknowledging the ephemerality of
my own life, but to realize that all life on the planet almost went belly-up is
mind-boggling, not to mention heart-wrenching. We think our presence on Earth
is inevitable because we’re here. Our memories are short. Like a gorilla in
Rwanda who shares 98 percent of our DNA, we don’t think about millions or
billions of years ago. We get into enough trouble worrying about the past and
future of our own lives.
What if life’s great experiment had gone belly-up millions
of years before human consciousness had ever formed? Before a human thought had
ever been born? Before anyone ever needed to be reminded to “be here now”
instead of living in a dream? Before quantum packets of starlight ever sparkled
into a human eye and kindled an imagination?
Would the universe be void and meaningless without us? Without
aliens on other planets who may have been shaped by their own near-miss
extinctions? There is no such thing as 16 billion years ago, at least not in
this 15-billion-year-old universe. What was the meaning of life before there
was even a universe?
Some probability of human beings must have existed in that
first spark some 15 billion years ago, the spark of creation itself. The alpha scintilla
shaped itself into a sprinkling of gassy stars, some of which eventually burned
through their hydrogen and helium and exploded into supernovas whose furnaces
furnished the elements of life and scattered them about the universe. Let
gravity pick them up. Let scientists put them in order, lightest to heaviest.
H-He-Li-Be-B-C-N-O-F-Ne, and so on.
Like any other sentient creatures that may exist in that vast cosmos, we are made of the elements formed in supernovas, shaped into life by the universe itself.
“Tat Tvam Asi,” the Dharma says. “Thou Art That.”
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