ENCELADUS
I read in the New York Times yesterday about the great excitement over one of the 58 moons of the planet Saturn spouting geysers of water that had phosphorous in it. Apparently there are six elements needed to form life as we know it. Five had already been discovered in the water spouting from Enceladus and now the sixth had been found and obviously Enceladus had a core of water, and inner ocean, because it kept spouting water out. All this was observed by the space probe Cassini which circled around Saturn for a couple of years.
The excitement over discovering phosphorous meant that deep in the core of Enceladus the process of chemical reactions through some forms of random jostling could lead combinations of elements that could more complex forms that could eventurally lead to individual cell that might cells that might finally be able to propagate by dividing leading to very primitive forms of life. This is how scientists believe life on earth began and some scientists have been able to reproduce this process in the laboratory so they know it is possible wherever there is water and these six elements.
The scientists were excited and so was I. But it didn’t take long for my excitement to wane for two reasons. The first thing that dampens my enthusiasm is my awareness that evolution is a random chance process which I am a random chance product of with without any moral meaning or purpose. Evolution is based on the premiss that life began in single cell microbes that could reproduce in this way led, slowly, slowly, slowly over eons to more complex life forms which through the process of evolution branched out into all life on earth: plants, insects, dinosaurs, mammals. Evolution is a process whereby chance mutations all along the way enable certain plants and animals to survive. So the reminder that I am here by chance dampens my enthusiasm. All life on earth is here by chance mutation and slow adaptation with endless dead ends and periods when almost all life became extinct and only a very few surviving form of life were left to continue the proces and to branch out again.
This is how I am here, pure chance, and with another mass extinction, a good chance that humans too will become extinct. I may think I am intelligent and perceptive and have purpose, but I am here and have these feelings simply through random, chance evolution. So this dampens my sense of having any importance at all.
And the second thing that dampens my enthusiasm is that the life that might be found in Enceladus is almost certainly, at best, a few floating cells, dividing again and again. And if there are more advanced bacteria or even some kinds of primitive worms it doesn’t make being here on earth by chance, lost among the starts any less lonely.
The only form of life that can cheer me up is right here, randomly evolved human beings. Bugs floating around in Enceladus won’t do it for me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 