When the light left the star in the sky you gazed up at last night, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
The beam that left their sun that eve, as you stared at its distant echoing, will arrive here so far in our future not only will you not be remembered by anyone or anything, your nations and cultures won’t be remembered nor your religion and the very concept of humans will have been forgotten for millions of years. Perhaps something utterly different and new will be knowledgeable enough to have found a few fossils of us, to be vaguely categorized by their most esoteric science-minds, and that’s a very best-case scenario. They’ll know as much of us as we do of which sports-teams the trilobites rooted for, the linguistic syntax of pterodactyl love-songs, the politics of dodo birds.
And yet here you are and there is the star and for some tiny little while, you are both real at once.
You sit stuck in traffic and wonder if you’ll have a job next week. If you’ll have sex next month? If you’ll be alive next year? They’re all valid questions. The same valid questions tens of billions of folks lived their lives asking from births to deaths. The same ones billions more will be asking until whatever comes along to wipe the slate clean for the next thing. Then the next then the next then that next again. Tens of thousands of cultures and nations and civilizations rose and fell, full of people with all the same questions. Little bits get half remembered for a few generations, sure, but we all slowly fade into the background-noise of history, like detuned analog-teevees at night.
Whether you find that all humbling or terrifying doesn’t matter a whit to entropy’s erratic march. You are left to find meaning in it or not, beauty in it or not, horror in that or not? You turn on the radio in your car and the news says that everything is on fire? The monsters are in power, the sea rises by the day, there’s death in the air, everything is on fire? They’re all valid questions as well.
When you look up in the night-sky, every one of those lights you see whether they are ten or ten million light-years away, you only get to see the distant memories of galaxies because they were on fire. You only see the residue of those miracles because everything up there is on fire as well.
You will be forgotten, as will your nations and your dreams, and your gods. But you are here for now, just the same as the star that burns so bright it can reach even the tininess of us. We may as well do a bit of good for each other while we’re stuck in traffic. If we screw up? It’s not like our failures will be remembered. If we do help each other, we’ll sure as hell feel it in our brief today.
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