Saturday, December 30, 2023

Oxygen - Separating the Science from the Fiction

Our current modern day mythology is that science and technology can do anything. And mythology is always about imbuing us Humans with super powers that put us above nature. And to some extent we are above nature due to our brain size and capacity for tool making. 

How is it we are the only primate without a coat of fur? As primate brain size evolved in our one species, tool making allowed that species, us, to survive harsher climates. 

It must have been a very slow process! Instinct drove the evolving human to expand its territories, and several things evolved simultaneously: the tool making capacity to begin making clothing, the capacity to withstand harsher climates, and the gradual loss of fur no longer needed for survival. Weapons gave us dominance over smaller brain species, and we gradually lost need of fangs and claws, the "biological weapons".

The odds against becoming a "one off" species with the capacity to dominate the ecological planet must be very small indeed. It is odd also that our super-capable species still "needs" mythology, ie, imaginary limitless capacity.

Of course there are still limits to our capacity, which are most succinctly defined in a single word: mortality. And from that comes the "need" for mythology. 

And modern mythology is found mostly in the form of science fiction.

"Action movies" are popular, and full of science fictions: guns that never run out of bullets, and heroes that recover from every imaginable injury by the very next day.

These super hero mythologies are easy to spot...what about those that aren't? And is their relative invisibility to us a positive or a negative? Harmless, or species damaging? Are these mythologies what allows us to unconsciously damage the earth's ecology? And what's the problem if we do? After we trash the earth we can just escape into space, right? Mars or bust?

Our most vital nourishment, the one that is invisible, oxygen, is to the best of our knowledge only found in sufficient quantity to create the "garden planet" that created us through biological processes that are so complex we do not understand them.

Or perhaps the earth was "seeded" by aliens with humans as an experiment, and they are above somewhere, watching to see what happens. Now that's a nice mythology!

Meanwhile, if "miracles" are true, the biology of Earth itself is primo miraculous. Or is primo miraculous the vast "deadness" of everywhere else?

Limitless oxygen in space is like guns that never run out of bullets.

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