A Tiny Blue Marble

We all live on the surface of this tiny blue marble floating in an infinite sea of nothingness, a nothingness utterly inimical to any life. Everyone who has ever existed has lived their entire lives on this tiny blue marble. For all we know, this tiny blue marble might be the only place in this entire universe that has creatures who are conscious. And we are united in not knowing what the world is, why it exists, why we exist, whether there's an afterlife, and what it all means, if anything.

Despite this, most of us spend our lives on the trivialities of existence and conforming. Getting a job, making money to buy things, getting married, drinking, sleeping, arguing about nothing, and eventually dying. None of which appears to mean much, if anything, in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps we'll find out what it all means when we die, or maybe we'll just enter into an eternity of nothingness. Perhaps we might wonder if everything is just a huge joke and our lives and the Universe are simply a fortuitous fluke and ultimately nothing means anything. But, even if our lives are a fluke, and we enter into an eternity of nothingness when we die, surely our lives and the human race, together with all other life on Earth, are still very special?

It is depressing, then, that the human race has devoted much of its time to killing others in wars and finding more efficient ways of doing so. And it is also depressing that people only care about their material comforts and pay no heed to environmental degradation to pay for those comforts. Is it really a great idea to seek short term gains to the detriment of the environment, and perhaps to eventually render this beautiful blue marble as uninhabitable for future generations? We all live in the same boat, or rather, we all live on the surface of the same tiny blue, beautiful marble. We desperately need to change our attitudes.