Has man a sense and a future in the world in which he lives?

I’ll try to sketch, in this article, our cosmic reality. I see it divided into two categories: objective and subjective or real and not real. Particles, atoms, molecules, all physical things are real; ideas, theories, concepts, are unreal in the sense that they are not physical. The physical world is totally independent from the human world, we, without the physical world, wouldn’t exist. Sure, we can have a brief, a very brief influence on it, a local influence, but in the long run the world would starts again and again to be the world. Differently said, harmony is a temporary phenomenon, chaos is its real stabilized nature.

This picture leads me to talk about man and his place in the universe, not in a wishful way, not in an academic or philosophic way, but in a palpable concrete way. I’ll do it in giving eight brief pictures of the universe, and in these eight brief pictures I’ll try to describe it and our position in it as objective as I can.

First picture of the universe. Let’s see, for an instant, all the phenomena that make up the entire universe, not the way we want to see them, but for what they are: things without names, naked bare objects in an immense vacuum. This is their reality. Seeing them so, how would they appear to us? They would appear as bodies, bodies big and small, strong and weak, bare and barren, of long and short duration, bodies, phenomena and nothing else.

The universe, in fact, when we want to see it as it is and not as we want it to be, is a mixture of bodies, bodies of all imaginable and unimaginable dimensions, structures, properties, bodies and bodies ourselves, and voilà its naked reality: a mass of objects, of phenomena, of wonders and nightmares, nothing more, nothing less than a mass of not controlling physical elements that roar chaotically in an infinite vacuum, crashing blindly against one another and, in the end, they destroy themselves by losing and disintegrating in the immensity they are in. This is our universe and this is also its ultimate truth and reality.

Someone may say: “It’s not true that the universe is only a mass of physical objects and nothing more. We human beings, with our brain, soul, thoughts, values, can demonstrate that what you said is wrong”.

To this remark I would reply by saying that if we see the mass of the objects that constitute the whole universe only in the short run, then the remark is correct. Correct, of course, up to a certain point, since all the values we gave to the universe are not its, but ours, we gave them to it and not it to us. Instead, if we see this mass of objects that constitute the universe in the long run, in million and billions of years, then we realize that we, for this mass of objects constantly in collision with one another, we are for them only momentary dust, pus, itch, disease, rubbish or, if you want, why not, we could consider ourselves a momentary decoration of the universe.

Second picture of the universe. There are two dominating forces in the universe, and these two dominating forces are neither quantum mechanics nor general relativity. These two real forces of the universe are expansion and contraction or extension and gravity. Expansion and contraction, of course, are produced by matter, by existing things, phenomena. No phenomena, no expansion and no contraction, therefore no universe. However, expansion and contraction exist. Now, all these bodies – planets, stars, meteorites, black holes, etc. – that speed chaotically and blindly in the universe, either they get lost in the unlimited space or they attract one another according to their mass. So the big ones become bigger and the small ones, in the long run, disappear. All the rest is secondary or, if you prefer, learned blah blah.

Third picture of the universe. The truth about the world-universe we live in is fundamentally this: once we are out of our solar system, we all grope in the unknown and in fog and vagueness regarding the real knowledge of the universe. Despite of this, we claim to know it as we know the back of our hands! Sure, we can know some basic things, like nothingness of nothingness, matter, space, time, etc., but we can’t know exactly how matter is disposed and how it behaves out of our Solar System, and let’s not talk about greater distances.

To sustain this idea, it’s enough one single example among billions of others from the Chaos Theory. Let’s see the world according to the Butterfly Effect. We can say that, as far as our existence is concerned, a small, a very small shift of the Earth’s axis would be enough to make life impossible on this planet.

Like it or not, man is a creature of this world, of this planet, of this atmosphere and out of it, even in the nearest space around the Earth, his life and existence are in danger. The Earth is his heart, his body, his house, his world, his universe. Out of this human cosmos in miniature in which man lives, for him there is 99 per cent of darkness and only one per cent of light, may be! Man is, and we all know it, a product of this big stone we call the Earth and of its elements, and out of them he is an expatriate, an extra-terrestrial, if you want. Man is shaped from head to toe in this world of ours and to this world he belongs as long as he exists, for good and for bad.

Fourth picture of the universe. We know, but only a few of us find the courage to say it, we know that one of these days, just like that, one of these days, a huge asteroid will pop up from the deep cosmos and point straight towards the Earth. It passes near the Sun, brushes Mercury, then Venus, avoids the Moon, flirts with man’s nuclear weapons and crashes in full might against the Earth.

What about this happening? Well, nothing to say, just another event like many others. In our world these happenings are the routine, the rule and not the exception.

Now just think about the crash between the huge asteroid and our planet, a crash that destroyed all life and everything else on it. Do you think that our Sun noticed anything? Venus, Mars and the Moon noticed anything? The rest of the Solar System noticed anything? The Earth, the big stone, noticed anything? The sea, the continents, the mountains, the islands noticed anything? No, nothing. All deaf, blind and dumb. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody took notice of anything, not even the last living creatures before dying. Everything continues to go on as before, as if nothing had happened. Everything, in the Solar System, continues on its way, just as it was before.

Question: Has the Earth ever been inhabited?

Answer: No, never, because nobody in the universe will ever find out one way or another.

Fifth picture of the universe. We live in a cosmic crater (the universe is not a flat net. As black holes make gravitational holes in the space, so the other phenomena do them according to their mass), the crater the Sun made in the space with its size, and in this crater we are born, live and die. That’s our destiny sooner or later, because that’s how things work in the immensity we live in. The cosmic crater in which we find ourselves is like a beehive. Bees are born, live and die in a cosmic hive, so human beings are born, live and die in the cosmic crater, their beehive. 

Sixth picture of the universe. When we humbly bow to the phenomenal world to which we belong, then we’ll discover that no science or philosophy can help us to escape from our cosmic loneliness and from our fate. And this is not all. Our life is made of instants all of them slaves of an eternal here and now. We don’t own anything else, just this blind here and now. Eternity, for human beings, means “here and now”.

Seventh picture of the universe. In a cosmic perspective we can see ourselves as a tight rope walker, one who walks on a stretched rope over a bottomless abyss. There is nothing in sight, only the rope, us and the abyss. This is our reality and this reality knows only the present, the eternal present. This present has nothing to do with time, but it has something to do with the duration that our body, a phenomenon among other phenomena, manages to  balance itself over the abyss on which, from birth to death, it is obliged to walk.

Eighth picture of the universe. This eighth picture is our place, our reality and destiny in the universe. It is from here that we must start, if we want to build ourselves a home and give a real meaning to our life, a life that is worth living, a real life, even if this means building upon an abyss; a life, therefore, without illusions and total. Living with this awareness and lucidity of mind is the maximum that a human being can achieve. This vision is no longer a desperate and absurd vision, at all, it is a healthy and objective vision. This vision, the vision that embraces our life and the totality of the universe in a real way, redeems us as the children of nothingness and this means accepting life and the universe, not for how we want life and the universe to be, BUT FOR WHAT LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE REALLY ARE.

The copyright of this article “Has man a sense and a future in the world in which he lives?” it’s mine, thank you.