two days ago the mars rover Curiosity successfully landed on the red planet. couldnt help but feel a warm peace inside..the lengths we as a species go to for the sake of curiosity itself. why mars? well the alternative is venus..and that planet is probably the best example of hell in the solar system. the next best place we could ever run to once we use earth up is probably mars, this in spite of the fact that the atmosphere there is 95% CO2 and there being no liquid water in sight.
yet if some extraterrestrial being were to visit earth, even long after our extinction...there would be something very noticeably different of this world from any other nearby. we would have structures, though derelict, still standing clearly apart from what nature intends. as the pyramids still stand today, so will our skyscrapers continue to break the skyline for the next 10,000 years. on any other planet the most interesting surface features would be craters or sand dunes, but even in the sandy oceans of egypt lie the unmistakable evidence of order against the chaos of nature.
while winds, weather and tectonic movement spread things around, we as intelligent life tend to separate, segregrate and classify. we move rocks from here to there, turn trees into chairs, and stack bricks into huge triangular tombs. while the second law of thermodynamics maintains the inevitable increase of entropy in a closed system, life like us have the nifty ability go against this principle in the local region. look how our earth has such an amazing abundance of free oxygen in the air, and pools of oil deep underground ready to be burnt. the earth itself is a giant battery charged by the sun for billions of years, a wonder only made possible by plants--a spectacular proof that we are the lowest entropic region in the entire solar system. and as men we are simply a small part of life. we build tall structures, and harness energy to store it...be it in the form of canned food or batteries. every single thing we do seems to be about creating a bubble of order in an infinity of chaos.
it is only on the day we die that we exit this bubble and submit to thermodynamics..the laws of the universe. it is a belief of mine, that nature has every intention of killing us--it is just that life itself is a powerful gift that axiomatically trivialises nature. we are born into mastery of it, as long as we call ourselves living, that until the day time claims us, and then we ourselves will become nature, while our structures remain for a tad while longer as the legacy of strange beings who lowered entropy wherever they went.
