[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You post a statement. The slow apocalypse that is nature. What is this slow apocalypse?
Rick Rosner: Not the slow apocalypse, the moment-to-moment apocalypse that’s nature. I Googled how many mammals there are on earth and I’d say that the vast majority of mammals are sentient. I can’t easily think of one that isn’t. There’s an estimate of 130 billion mammals alive at any given moment. And then you take other animals that are sentient. Sea creatures; fish and amphibians, most reptiles depending on where you want to set the bar, probably some bugs and birds. So you multiply that 130 billion by a hundred, say, conservatively and you get 13 trillion sentient or near sentient creatures alive at any moment which means that any given second, billions of sentient creatures die, which is a lot. The way we’ve evolved, the way all creatures have evolved there are things that were driven to accomplish in our lives but also we like being alive.
I mean not every moment is a stellar moment but we like existing. Again due to evolution, creatures who like existing they’re the ones who exist. There are billions of little tragedies every second and then if you assume that the processes of life are similar and life and evolution are similar throughout the universe, multiply the little tragedies on earth times another billion out of 10 to the 22nd solar systems figure that easily have a billion of them supporting evolved life. You can either look at it as sad or you can look at it as meaningless or you can look at it as somehow justified because it’s in line with nature but regardless how you look at it, I think it requires some thinking about because it’s just a huge death toll of creatures who would prefer not to die.
I guess there is some hope that as we take over our own evolution that we can become custodians of our own and other creatures’ extended life spans and replicated consciousnesses and I suppose you could argue that the amount of life that transcends once our technology or sufficiently sophisticated civilizations technology becomes capable of making beings practically immortal and resurrecting beings and entire classes of beings, maybe that outweighs the bloodbath that is evolved life. But I don’t know, that’s a very iffy argument since we haven’t done that for even one consciousness yet.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 