Talk:Life ... it's our epic story!

==Babies as worthy or unworthy== I once wrote a story, lost long ago, that went something like this: The narrator is standing in a greenhouse watching a beautiful woman, dressed in green, with green hair and bright green eyes, working with the plants. She touches the soil here and there and each spot she touches a new and different and beautiful flower grows forth. Then I hear wailing and screaming behind, I turn and look out through the glass. A line of giant babies are crawling toward me. As they crawl forward they trample every plant and animal in their path. Their hunger drives them to reach out continuously and gobble up what ever they can grab, plants, animals, fungus. They stream past and around the greenhouse and after they have passed the lush landscape and been replaced by a stinking festering landscape covered in piles of feces and used diapers. I hear a whimper behind me and turn. The inside of the greenhouse has been altered too. The lush wet black soil has been replaced by grey sand. The beautiful woman is now old and sick, half buried in the dry dead sand, she is dying. This story was a protest against the idea that babies are miracles. I felt that no longer could we see them that way in the face of world wide overpopulation. Although, I now accept that the truth is that babies are miracles, 'everything in moderation' is a useful proverb and applies as much to miracles as vices. ==Responsibility for future wrongs== Think of your favourite author, your favourite artist. Think of the joy they have brought you and millions of others through their works. Then again think of the worst historic villain whether dictator, criminal or just selfish, callous person. Think of the pain and suffering they have brought to millions through their works. Now think about the history of the human race from the perspective of parent and child. Start by defining everyone in a particular generation, generation zero, as the beginning of a line. Each child has two parents and is therefore the combination of two lines while some people in the previous generation don't even have any children. So the more generations you go into the future from your starting point the fewer lines there are. At first the number of lines in each generation is less than half the number of the previous generation. Later on more and more children are the products of the marriage of distant cousins and so from the perspective of generation zero they no longer combine lines but only continue them. Still long before generation 40, given the size of the population on Earth, there will only be one generation zero line left. Every child born, if they are genetically successful, after 40 generations will be the ancestor of everyone alive. So yes they will be the ancestor of every horrendous villain but they will also be the ancestor of every great author and every great artist, every doctor who find a cure to a terrible disease. They will be the ancestor of every leader who starts war, but also to every leader who negotiates a peace. A child can be a seed that eventually leads to all the miraculous beauty of the human race. Our civilization can be a seed that can lead to all the miraculous beauty of all the great artists of a trillion-year-long Galaxy-spanning civilisation. Likewise, our biosphere is a seed that can lead to all the miraculous beauty of a green and thriving universe. Yes, there will be horrors and atrocities committed along the way. But what is the alternative. To say that greening the universe is a mistake is to say that no Permian amphibian should ever have chirped for a mate because one of his descendants started a war. It is to say that we should teach the frogs living today to be silent and chaste in their spring pools least their descendents invent a chemical weapon. The alternative to life is death. Without life the Earth would be a dead ball of rock. That life also causes death is only a paradox in the mind of someone who's internal model of the universe is too simple. Death is a necessity to life. There would not be space of the earth for all the living creatures that would still be alive if none had died since the beginning of time. The only way that there would be space for them all is if they had not reproduced. But reproduction powers evolution. Without reproduction there would be nothing but single primordial slime, barely metabolising in a stagnant stinking sea and there wouldn't even be anyone to complain about the smell.