The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume XL

Ah, dystopia.

March 30, 2022

Ah, dystopia.

Can you feel it?

That sleepy light piano note of eternity lingering in the air. That’s dystopia. It’s right there. Just around the corner, up ahead, waiting.

We are the only species on Earth with the ability to completely destroy it. So nice to be at the top of the food chain. Standing on the pinnacle of life as we know it. What could be better than being the most powerful creatures on Earth? Being tops in the universe, I guess.

We very well may be just that. While we might think we have evidence of extraterrestrial life, we do not have absolute proof, so as far as we know, we are it. We are the only thinking creatures in the universe who can destroy our own planet.

Fun, I know.

I have only recently discovered podcasts. When I say recently I mean in the last few years. I guess it was about 2010 when I first learned of podcasts. I was invited to be on one to talk about The Clearwater Film Festival. Since it was a new concept to me I had trouble wrapping my mind around it.

“Where is this going to play at?” I asked.

“It’s on the computer. You just pull it up and listen.” they told me.

“Why would anyone do that?”

They explained how podcasts work and I was certain that nobody would ever find it or hear what I had to say, but I agreed to an interview and went ahead and did it. It was fun and painless. I never did find the podcast to listen to it, but I did find others to listen to over the years.

I do not listen to many, just a handful, and of those that I have, unless it is a long narrative that needs to be heard from beginning to end, I don’t always listen to every episode. It is not like TV, of course. Without something to watch, I can’t just sit and listen and do nothing or I will just fall asleep, no matter what the subject is. Some people I know can listen while they work. I thought I would give that a try. I crunch numbers at my day job and usually listen to ambient, psychill, downtempo, jazz, or bossa nova. I can work with that. Anything with lyrics I know, I focus on the words and sing along, so I can’t get work done. Maybe a podcast would be right for me, I thought.

So I listened to one while I was working. I did not fall asleep. Instead, I tuned it out completely. I heard the introduction, yatta, yatta, yatta, then the next thing I knew it was ending. I had no idea what anyone said. I could not recall it at all. It was white noise that I just ignored. So I can’t listen while I work.

But I wanted to hear the podcast, so I listened to it in my car on the way home, hoping I would not fall asleep. I did not. I am adept at driving and listening. That day I absorbed the whole thing and discovered a new form of entertainment that I would embrace. Driving became my white noise.

I love driving. Unlike so many who say they can’t stand it, that it frustrates them, they drive fast so they can reach their destination and get it over with sooner, I am the opposite in every way. I find heavy traffic to be exceptionally calming. When I have vehicles all around me in every lane moving at speeds above 60 MPH, I find harmony in that, and am able to concentrate. It is here I can listen to podcasts.

And I can binge them, unlike TV shows, which I dole out one at a time. When a narrative takes hold I listen to the whole thing.

In my travels over the last week I thoroughly enjoyed The End Of The World with Josh Clark. Perfect fodder for thoughts on life as it examines every existential threat we know of. You don’t have to listen in your car, but I hope you will add it to your list.

There is only one supposition on life beyond death, which is downloading your brain for eternity, but eternity does not last forever. The series focuses on every single way life on Earth may be extinguished. Primarily, the human race, but if that happens, that's all folks. Nothing else will really matter.

You may recall Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot, based on the photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun, looking at Earth one last time before venturing outside of our solar system. Here is an excerpt.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan 1994

It is hard to say it better than that.

But if you want to scratch the surface of truly understanding the vastness of space and our place in it, watch this.

Now, if that does not make you realize how tiny you actually are, maybe this will.

Try to consider what being tiny really means. Just think about the tiniest insect that you have ever seen and imagine that it was you. Now consider that the person looking at you is the size of the galaxy. That would make Earth the size of the universe. Not exactly to scale, but stay with me.

The universe is everything we know. Black holes are akin to the deepest ocean depths and caverns so far down in the mantle that nobody has ever seen them. They have not been illuminated for millions of years. Perpetual darkness, forever. If you want to imagine what it is like to be that tiny insect, just look up in the sky and realize that the light from most of those stars left them billions of years ago and that they may no longer even exist. You exist only in their future, and you can see only into their past. If there is anyone out there, say a million light years away, looking at their night sky, seeing our sun right now, they are viewing it as it looked a million years ago. And when we look at their star, we are seeing the same thing, that star as it was a million years ago. And if we spotted their planet, and thought it could harbor life, if there were any way to see that life, we would only see what existed a million years ago. We will never, ever, ever, ever be able to communicate with that person who is looking at Earth, and neither of us can prove the other actually exists.

So consider, when you look at the massive explosions of supernovas of long ago, that what you are seeing is merely a snapshot of the past. You have no proof that life ever existed in that space and no way to find it with absolute certainty, because it has been wiped out, just like we will be someday. That is why it is important to cherish life, and every moment of it that you can, because the single century you get on Earth, is not guaranteed to even last that long for you. That tiny bug that considers you their galaxy and the earth their entire universe, has a tiny lifespan, sometimes only hours.

The creature that lives fastest and dies hardest is the gastrotrich, a near-microscopic creature that lives in water all over the world. They are flat and transparent, and live just under a week. They reach sexual maturity in three days, reproducing by cloning, and die a day or two later.

Finally, consider that your life is like that of the gastrotrich, born on a Sunday. Your hundred years, if you are lucky enough to get all of them, packed into a week. Everybody reading this right now may only be on the Thursday or Friday of their life. Some may be on Saturday already. You will never see another Sunday.

Knowing that the clock ticks incessantly forward, and nothing pulls back or freezes the hands of time, what will you do to make the most of your existence? To make it count for something? To make it what you want it to be? To make a mark that you can leave behind for a while? One that you will be proud of, one that will teach or entertain, one where you would be happy to point at from beyond the veil and say “I did that!”?

I wrote a book. And I made some films, and I try to be as good a listener as I try to be entertaining. Doing what you can to make life nice for yourself and those around you is about all anybody can do.

When you make your mark on the world, please make it a good one, avoid creating dystopia if you can, and enjoy life. Nothing lasts forever.